You Are Hiring The Wrong People
If CX is 80% AI, who should you hire? (practical advice)
Hi Team!
If you are reading this, you have almost made it to the end of Q1.
Will you be at Shoptalk next week??? If you are, please swing by booth 2670 and say hi.
I had three conversations there last year about hiring for CX, and every single one started the same way: we can’t find good people.
SORRY for the hot take, but I think the problem is you’re looking for the wrong people.
You’re still hiring people to answer tickets, and that part of the job is slowly going away.
This week, let’s talk about what the CX role actually turns into once AI swallows the grunt work, why your best hire probably doesn’t know Zendesk exists, and the one skill nobody bothers screening for.
Let’s get into it.
This week’s newsie is brought to you by KODIF AI.
As your brand scales, customer conversations explode across support, pre-purchase, and every corner of your site. The question becomes: do you build a larger team, or a smarter one?
The AI CX market is crowded, but here are a few reasons KODIF stands apart from what I’ve seen:
1️⃣ Built for complexity — not just basic FAQ.
From what I’ve seen other AI agents break when SOPs get multi-system and conditional. KODIF asks you to give them your most complex SOP, and automate that.
For example, I saw how KODIF chat agent handled Aura Frames complex troubleshooting product issues end-to-end — walking a customer through diagnostic steps and, if needed, triggering a replacement part order inside the same flow. I was impressed.
2️⃣ An AI CX team > one AI Agent
They build AI CX Team, purpose - specialized agents that mirror CX roles: an AI Support Agent for resolution, AI Concierge for pre-purchase and conversion, AI Analyst for insights, and AI Manager for continuous improvement. It’s a team model, not a catch-all model.
3️⃣ Deep ecommerce integrations (not surface-level)
They’ve built 178+ ecommerce integrations and shipped 88 new ones in 2025 alone.
You all know that matters because automation only works when the system can actually take action, not just answer questions.
Some recent cool reviews on the success stories:
“The customizability of KODIF is what excites me most. I’m in there every day. Containment is great and all, but quality matters just as much or more. Our automation rate is above 70% but more importantly we are leveraging KODIF for retention.”
— Jack Dukesherer, Sr. Manager, Member Engagement Ops
“The Chat AI Agent can walk someone through calibrating their grinder — it’s super resourceful with the right inputs. Furthermore, address changes and cancellations? Completely automated. I haven’t thought about a cancellation in ages.”
— Cindy Rodriguez, Director of CX
“We started with deflection as the goal, but it turned into more — now the AI helps customers discover products, understand ingredients, and convert. That’s real ROI.”
Cristina Fucchi, Chief Customer Officer
Something that stood to me is their founders’ strong engineering background. Their CTO, Norm previously built Uber’s customer support automation platform, automating 150 million customer requests per month.
KODIF is trusted by top ecommerce brands such as True Classic, Ruggable, Dollar Shave Club, Liquid I.V., One Skin, Aura Frames, Fellow, Neuro, Who Gives a Crap, Million Dollar Baby, Ivy City, Helix Sleep and many others.
Many teams review their CX stack in Q1, and if your support workflows are complex, it might be worth a conversation with Chyngyz and the KODIF team to see if it’s a fit. They promise to go live in 3-5 days.
Also, they are offering my readers 3-months for free… Just hit up their team and drop my name, Eli Weiss. This offer is valid only through March 31, 2026.
The job posting is a lie
Pull up your last CX job posting. Does it ask for experience with Zendesk or Gorgias, strong written communication skills, and the ability to handle high ticket volume?
Congrats, you just described someone whose primary value is about to get automated into oblivion.
Sorry, but most CX job descriptions are written by someone in HR who last talked to a customer in 2019. They ask for platform experience and typing speed like they’re hiring a court stenographer.
Meanwhile, the actual job, six months from now, is going to be 60% emotional triage and 40% creative problem-solving a small amount of high-value tickets under pressure, and nothing in that posting screens for either.
I met someone last year who’d been managing a boutique hotel front desk for six years. Never touched a helpdesk platform. Never heard of CSAT. But they could read a room in four seconds, de-escalate a screaming guest while rebooking their suite, and remember that the couple in room 4B mentioned it was their anniversary.
That’s the person you want on your CX team when AI eats 80% of your inbound volume. The problem is most job postings would filter her out in round one because she doesn’t have two years of ecommerce support experience.
You know that hire who crushes tickets like a robot but goes silent when someone calls in tears? That worked yesterday. Now you need someone who stays calm when the building’s on fire, makes the call without checking Slack seventeen times, treats an angry customer like a real problem instead of ticket number 4,352. That old playbook from two years ago is gathering dust.
Screen for hospitality, not helpdesk
When AI handles password resets, shipping updates, return labels.. what’s left?
The disasters, the stuff that makes people pick up the phone or write an email in all caps at 2am.
Like a $400 order that showed up destroyed the day before a wedding. Someone who just discovered their subscription renewed after they’re sure they cancelled it three weeks ago. A customer whose 78-year-old mother accidentally ordered six months of product, and now they want to return it, but your policy says no refunds after 30 days.
Sure, tagging tickets correctly is nice. But what you actually need is someone who can take the emotional hit, make a call on the spot without running to a manager, and leave the customer feeling heard without lighting your margins on fire. That’s hospitality.
The best CX people I’ve ever hired came from hospitality. Four years managing a busy Brooklyn brunch spot, handling Karens mad about cold eggs, a kitchen 45 minutes behind, servers walking out mid-shift.
They can learn Gorgias in a week. But the instinct for matching tone to the situation, apologizing in a way that lands, breaking policy when it matters and holding the line when it doesn’t… You don’t get that from a PDF.
Front desk managers, restaurant hosts, school teachers, and retail folks. They’ve spent years absorbing customer chaos under pressure, just not in your ticketing system.
They can read what someone’s really upset about instead of taking their words at face value. They de-escalate without a script. They make calls when things explode, no permission slip required. But your current job posting doesn’t speak their language.
The one skill nobody screens for
The one skill very few people screen for is: can this person actually read a room instead of robotically following a script?
A customer whose $12 lip balm is two days late does not need the same response as someone whose $400 anniversary gift showed up shattered the morning of. One needs a quick acknowledgment and a tracking link. The other needs someone who can say oh god, that’s awful, let me fix this right now, and actually mean it.
Great CX people do this on instinct. Warm and casual one message, urgent and apologetic the next, whatever the customer actually needs right now. Good people catch tone shifts mid-conversation, adjust without breaking stride.
Most people can’t do this. They pick one tone and ride it into the ground. They’re either overly formal with everyone or way too casual when someone is genuinely pissed. They don’t calibrate.
And the problem is you can’t really test for this in an interview. You can role-play a scenario or two, but the person who nails a fake angry customer exercise might completely botch it when a real one comes through and the stakes actually matter.
The closest proxy I’ve found is to ask about a time they had to handle someone who was irrationally upset about something that wasn’t their fault, and how they handled it. Not what they said, but how they felt during it, and what they did after.
If they tell you a story about absorbing someone’s anger and then figuring out how to fix the underlying issue even though the person was being unreasonable, that’s your hire. If they tell you a story about how they followed the script and escalated to a manager, keep looking.
AI’s chewing through the boring tickets. The repetitive stuff, the no-brainer questions, the ones where you don’t need judgment or empathy or any ability to read a room. What’s sticking around is actual work. And the people who are killer at it are not scrolling LinkedIn for your Zendesk power user posting.
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.
