The new CX perfect hire (it's not what you think)
When AI automates 80% of volume, these are the only traits that matter...
Hi Team!
March is chaos. Wife is working 80-hour weeks and I’m solo for the best hours of the day with both kids. 6-8am and 6-8pm, twice a day, every day. Just me and them. It’s exhausting and also the best part of my week, which is a weird thing to say when you’re running on four hours of sleep.
Aside from that, my sister got married last night, and a ton of my friends and family are in a war zone. But we’re all good considering.
This week, I want to talk about something that’s been rattling around in my head since I left Jones Road. If AI handles 70-80% of CX chats in the next year or two, what does the job of a CX hire actually become? It won’t be the things we looked for back then, which were speed, macros, or tool fluency.
So what does the new CX perfect hire look like?
Let’s get into it.
This week’s newsie is brought to you by Armin!
If you run an ecommerce brand, you know the pain: 60-80% of your support tickets are the same repetitive stuff. “Where’s my order?” “Can I get a copy of my invoice?” “I need to change my address.” Your team spends their day copy-pasting tracking links instead of solving complex inquiries.
ArminCX was built specifically to fix this.
1️⃣ Tickets that resolve themselves. ArminCX’s AI reads the customer’s message pulls the order number, checks shipping status in your backend, grabs the tracking link, and sends a complete reply. Brands are seeing 50-80% of tickets fully automated.
2️⃣ Deep integrations where it matters. Shopify, WooCommerce, Klaviyo, your local shipping carriers ... ArminCX connects natively to the systems your team actually uses. Agents can refund, cancel, or update an address without leaving the tool.
3️⃣ Every channel, one inbox. Email, WhatsApp, Instagram, live chat, phone, etc. All in one place with full order history in the sidebar. No more tab chaos.
If your support team is buried in repetitive tickets and held together by five different tools, ArminCX is worth a serious look.
Check them out!
The Old CX Playbook Was Built for a Different World
For most of the last decade, CX hiring was optimization-driven.
You looked for people who could move fast, hit SLAs, manage a ticket queue without drowning, and know their way around Zendesk or Gorgias. If someone had seen a few different brands, had clean escalation instincts, and could churn through volume without making a mess, you felt safe.
That playbook made sense when every ticket required a human. When “support” meant a person reading and responding to everything, throughput mattered. Macros and process-following mattered. You could argue about tone later, but first, you had to survive the queue.
The problem is that we are hiring for that world while the ground is shifting under us.
If AI handles the repetitive layer, then speed and tool fluency stop being differentiators.
AI Takes the Volume, Humans Inherit the Weight
In an AI-first world, most of the ticket types that make up daily CX life get absorbed.
WISMO, address changes, invoice copies, subscription pauses, and clean refunds that fall neatly inside policy. The stuff that chews up an entire day and gives you nothing to show for it besides “we cleared the backlog.”
AI will do that faster than any team of humans, and it will do it consistently. That is not a scary statement, it is simply the direction everything is going.
So what is left for people?
The edge cases, emotional moments, weird situations, and conversations where the customer is not just asking for information, but making a decision about whether they still trust you.
Those are lower volume and much higher leverage.
This is where CX stops being a ticket function and starts being a relationship function.
A Small Story That Made Me Hate Myself
I had a moment recently that made this feel very real.
I have spent thousands of dollars with a brand over the years. I have recommended them to friends. I have been the kind of customer brands want, the one who keeps coming back without needing a promo every time.
A recent order arrived and an item broke after a few days of usage. I reached out, and I was five days outside their return window.
The responses I got were polite and technically correct. They referenced policy, they were structured, and yet they also felt cold in a way that is hard to unsee once you feel it.
I explained the situation, mentioned my history, tried to be reasonable. They told me, for the fourth time in the thread, that nothing could be done.
At some point, I realized something that surprised me.
As a VIP customer, I would have rather had AI let me down slowly than have a human read my email and then choose to be policy-first in such a blunt way. At least with AI, you can tell yourself it is a system limitation. When a human does it, you feel the message underneath the message, which is that you are not worth the exception.
The dollar amount did not matter as much as the interaction did.
It changed how I feel about the brand.
Hospitality and CX Are Going to Merge
Imagine you are a regular at a restaurant. You have eaten there for years, know the staff, bring friends, and tip well.
One night, the food comes out mediocre. You mention it calmly, not in a dramatic way, just honest feedback.
If the manager walks over and reads you the policy off the back of the menu, you are done. You might finish your meal. You might even pay without making a scene. You are not coming back.
That is the case in hospitality.
It is also CX.
The only difference is that ecommerce has gotten away with being colder because you cannot see the person on the other side of the screen. AI is about to remove even more of that human friction, which makes the moments where a human does show up even more important.
In 2026, the human agent is not primarily a problem solver. The human agent is the person who turns tension into trust when the automation does not.
That is the job.
What Hiring for CX in 2026 Actually Means
This is where I think a lot of traditional CX profiles will struggle.
Many support environments train for compliance, risk avoidance, and consistency. They reward sticking to macros, escalating quickly, and staying inside strict guardrails. Those instincts are not evil, and they exist for real reasons, but they are not the instincts that create loyalty when the only tickets humans see are the ones that matter.
If AI takes the 80 percent, humans own the 20 percent that drives retention.
That means you should hire for a different set of traits:
Judgment under ambiguity, because the “right” answer will often be situational.
Emotional intelligence, because the customer is rarely just asking for the literal thing they typed.
Writing that sounds human and on-brand, because if your human sounds like a bot, then you should have just used a bot.
Comfort operating without scripts, because the best high-touch interactions are contextual, not templated.
A hospitality instinct, where the goal is protecting the relationship, not closing the ticket.
Tools can be taught quickly, and unfortunately, taste and EQ cannot.
What This Changes Inside the Team
If automation is doing the repetitive work, CX teams will not look the same.
They will likely be smaller. More senior. More brand-aligned. The work will sit closer to retention than to ops. The remaining humans will be handling fewer interactions, but each interaction will carry more weight.
The cost savings from automation should not disappear into the void.
If you are going to automate the volume, you should reinvest into the humans who remain. Pay them better. Train them differently. Give them the context that makes judgment possible, including customer segmentation, LTV, and what you are willing to do for a top customer versus a first-time buyer.
If your best people still feel like they are being graded on handle time while they are trying to save relationships, you are going to get the worst of both worlds.
That’s it for this week!
Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?
Just shoot me a DM or an email!
Cheers,
Eli 💛
P.S. If you want to figure out how to get your brand to rank high in LLMs and show up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and more… check this out.
