Jeff Toister
The Service Culture GuideHuman Service at Scale: Measurement, Trust, and the 2030 Vision
"The fundamentals stay the same... What matters most is the customer experience vision. One hallmark of a strong service culture is using the vision to make decisions, such as when and how to put AI in front of their customers." — Jeff Toister
In an era where technology can resolve issues end-to-end without human intervention, the definition of service excellence is shifting from speed to depth. While transactional automation becomes a commodity, the value of authentic human connection has never been higher. Navigating this hybrid landscape requires more than just deploying new tools; it demands a leadership commitment to a vision that elevates human capability rather than sidelining it. This article explores how organizations can scale “Human Service” by focusing on unreplicable human skills and the structural trust required to lead into 2030.
Q & A
You've written about the difference between companies that train customer service skills and companies that build customer service cultures. Now agentic AI is entering the picture -systems that don't just respond but take actions and resolve issues end-to-end without a human in the loop. Does that change what service culture means for the humans who remain? Or do the fundamentals stay the same regardless of what the technology does around them?
The fundamentals stay the same.
To clarify, training customer service skills and building service cultures are not mutually exclusive. Giving employees the skills they need to do their job is an essential part of building a service culture. What’s important for leaders to realize is that service skills alone are not enough to build, grow, or sustain customer obsession.
What matters most is the customer experience vision. One hallmark of a strong service culture is using the vision to make decisions, such as when and how to put AI in front of their customers. I’ve seen customer-focused leaders carefully implement AI to enhance the customer experience, such as using AI to shorten customer wait times or give human employees more capacity to spend extra time with customers who need it.
I’ve also seen other leaders implement AI without a clear vision. The AI isn’t properly trained or monitored to ensure it works properly. There are no clear escalation paths. The AI also lacks access to even basic knowledge so it struggles to give correct answers or consistent service.
SearchUnify Lens:
Training alone cannot compensate for an AI that lacks “basic knowledge”. We help leaders realize Jeff’s vision-led implementation by using ML-based relevance tuning that learns from how customers actually search, ensuring the system gets smarter with use, not just bigger with content. This allows the AI to handle transactional tasks reliably while freeing human capacity for nuanced service.
In Human Service, you identify connection, understanding, and advocacy as the three skills that create value no technology can replicate. As agentic AI takes on more of the transactional layer, do these three skills become more important or simply more visible; and of the three, which do you think organisations are worst at developing in their people today?
Oh no, I won’t choose favorites among those human skills! All three are critically important. The best organizations are very intentional about helping employees connect with customers, understand their needs, and advocate for great results.
To answer your question, I think it helps to reframe it a little. Companies typically “hire” three types of agents right now. One type is agentic AI, which can help customers on its own. The second type of agent is a human, who brings human skills to situations where agentic AI can’t handle the task, customers don’t want to deal with AI, or a human simply adds extra value. Those two agents often work well together, with agentic AI (and other automation) handling more transactional work and humans working with customers when their special skills are needed.
A great example of this is an e-commerce company. Customers can use automated tools to identify the best products to suit their needs. They can also connect with a human agent when they have detailed questions or just need an extra-boost of confidence. Automation effectively handles those basic inquiries, but the company discovered that human agents close twice as many sales as AI when customers have additional questions.
The third type of agent is the real one to avoid. It’s the employee who acts like a robot. They make no effort to connect with customers and put people at ease. These robo-employees fail to understand their customers’ needs or emotions, so they struggle to provide effective service. Robotic employees also don’t care whether their customers have a good experience, which really makes customers upset.
SearchUnify Lens:
To prevent the “robo-employee” syndrome, organizations must remove the robotic tasks from the human workload. Our Agent Helper and Knowbler solutions empower agents by providing contextual knowledge recommendations and enabling knowledge creation in the flow of work. This infrastructure frees humans to be human, focusing their energy on the connection and advocacy that drives the sales lift Jeff highlights.
You've spent decades helping organisations build cultures where employees always seem to do the right thing. What does that phrase actually require from leadership? Because it sounds effortless, but the work behind it isn't.
Service culture requires a deep commitment from leadership. I’m talking to two companies right now, where the contrast between approaches perfectly highlights why one will continue to build a strong culture and the other will struggle.
Leaders at the first company are committed. They’ve already built a great culture. There’s a clear vision that employees all know and everyone is aligned around executing that vision in their daily work. The organization is growing rapidly, so I’ve been asked to speak at a company meeting to augment the customer-obsessed message leaders are already sharing with their employees and help them stay on the right track. I’m confident they’ll succeed.
Leaders at the second organization are not committed. Revenue is at risk due to a lack of service, but leaders don’t want to handle the issue directly. An administrator was assigned to find an external trainer to “fix it” with a single training session. There’s no vision, employees don’t have a shared understanding of what’s expected, and leaders spend virtually no time working on service. They don’t even want to participate in the training session because they’re “too busy.” I’ll likely decline this engagement unless leaders show a willingness to commit and take ownership of their culture.
This second organization is sadly reflective of how too many organizations approach service culture. I’ve seen this enough times to know it won’t work. An outside speaker or trainer will never fix your culture. It has to start within and it has to start at the top.
SearchUnify Lens:
Leadership commitment is also reflected in the willingness to measure what truly matters. While many obsess over deflection, committed leaders use SearchUnify’s analytics to surface intent detection and content gaps, ensuring they take ownership of the knowledge obstacles preventing their teams from doing the “right thing”.
Looking Ahead: Human Service in 2030
If we were to look toward 2030, the core skills of connection, understanding, and advocacy will stubbornly remain the most valuable assets an organization possesses. While the tools used to surface information will continue to evolve, the need for humans to handle detailed inquiries and provide "confidence boosts" will only grow—as evidenced by the fact that human agents can close twice as many sales as AI in high-stakes moments.The organizations that get this right by 2030 will be those that invested in unifying their knowledge today. They will have built continuous learning loops between AI and humans, moving beyond efficiency to measure the outcomes that actually matter to customers. Ultimately, the future of service belongs to those who use technology to make their people more human, not more robotic.
