When It Goes Wrong · Ego
What happens when a customer doesn't feel heard?
I help leadership teams fix the human side of complaints, crises and AI in customer service. I’m Sudhir Sharma: I worked on crisis management for YouTube at Google and wrote my INSEAD thesis on customer aggression. I work across Australia, Asia, the US and Europe.
Fix the human side first. It’s what people remember, and it’s what the algorithm reads.
The point of view
Where does customer anger come from?
Not from bad customers. It comes from a failed human interaction, where the customer isn’t heard, acknowledged or held. Every escalation after that is the same failure, louder.
Trust isn’t built by the complaints process. It’s built by whether the person feels heard before they ever need one. That takes a safe holding environment, for customers and for the people who serve them.
Now AI is going in front of customers. It’s a process replacement, mistaken for a human replacement. Put it on a process that already fails people and it doesn’t remove the anger. It industrialises it.
Trust isn’t built by the complaints process.
Where the two judges meet
What do your angry customers teach the algorithm?
A complaint
goes unresolved
A review
one star, in public
A thread
on a forum or social
An AI answer
about your company
An unresolved complaint doesn’t stay in the queue. The engines read your reviews and threads, and repeat them. That makes reputation part of AEO, not a separate PR job.
The work
How do I help?
Pre-rollout review
Before AI goes in front of your customers.
I review the journey your customers will actually take, find where people stop feeling heard, and tell you what to fix before launch. [Length] · [Fee]
Complaints, reviews and reputation
When the complaints are already public.
I trace what customers are saying, what the engines repeat, and the handful of service failures behind most of it.
Crisis and change
When something has broken, or is about to change.
Crisis response for the human side, and change work before anything breaks. Change is led by people, for people.
Crisis work for organisations is delivered with [partner, via Autobot InfoSec] or under your own contracts.
Can your organisation absorb the AI you're buying?
The AI Readiness Score measures your technology against the trust that decides whether people adopt it. The gap is your culture debt. 10 questions.
Book a consult
Which judge is the problem?
If something has gone wrong, or AI is about to go in front of your customers, book the review.