Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner was released in 1940, starring Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart. Decades later, in 1998, filmmaker Nora Ephron adapted the film into the Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan-starring vehicle You’ve Got Mail. But where the latter film honed in on the romantic tale at the center of the story, eschewing the location, time period, and themes of the earlier film, the original is as much about the customer service and retail industries as it is about the blossoming romance of the characters within it.
Perhaps no film more succinctly epitomizes the melancholy, joyous triumph, and profound hardships of working in customer service during the holiday season than The Shop Around the Corner. Throughout the film’s runtime, viewers can view the interworking of the relationships between these characters who all work together within the same titular ‘shop,’ and how they interact with one another and with the customers in the store. It all builds up to Christmas Eve, their busiest day of the year, where the team of workers bands together and makes it through the onslaught of sales, forging stronger relationships amongst themselves and their ardent shoppers in the process.
What The Shop Around the Corner so brilliantly foregrounds that so many films made about customer service roles since then have missed is the way in which the shared human experience is such a fundamental aspect of the industry. The way in which a worker’s relationship with their fellow workers and the customers they serve may begin within the strict confines of a capitalist system, but how through empathy, care, and genuine human emotion, it can evolve into something much more meaningful. This human element is at stake when it comes to implementing AI in customer service roles. As AI is more actively courted in interpersonal scenarios, such as an AI girlfriend or retail positions, the beauty of human connection may well be irreparably damaged.
The Essential Nature of Customer Service
Customer service roles are not exactly positions that many people aspire to, yet they are essential. This was proven, quite literally, during the COVID lockdowns, in which only ‘essential workers’ were allowed to leave their homes and continue working. These essential positions were almost entirely comprised of customer service roles, as sanitation and restaurant workers were allowed to continue working to better serve their local communities.
But beyond the essentialness of such positions to the community surrounding them, these positions are also essential to workers themselves. While working in these roles may not seem aspirational, they can be well-paying roles that allow people to make a living through the effort and grit of their day-to-day work. These roles serve as gateway positions for countless individuals in the workforce and have done so for decades. The number of people whose first job was working as a waitress or as a retail clerk is astounding, and it’s easy to see why. Though these positions are full of hardships and often underappreciated, they instill a rigorous work ethic and a core set of institutional values into the individual in a palpable fashion.
AI Encroaching Upon Invaluable Human Positions
To this degree, customer service positions benefit everyone. The worker gets a job, a paycheck, and a crash course in a professional field. The company gets a worker and the community surrounding the worker receives the service they desire, so it’s a win-win-win. Yet, despite this, as AI has grown increasingly common in professional fields, the customer service industry has been increasingly disrupted by this new technology. As businesses and companies realize that AI is capable of performing more work in a shorter period of time for a smaller amount of money, they have begun phasing out lower-class workers in favor of utilizing AI.
Initially, the workers themselves met the spread of AI in the customer service industry with open arms. Just as AI took over remedial, mundane, and repetitive tasks in the business sphere, so too did it do so within the customer service industry, bringing joy to the workers who were freed of the burden of performing these tasks themselves. When the first AI system was implemented into the drive-thrus of Checkers nationwide, few workers voiced any concerns or disdain for the move because working the drive-thru was a largely thankless task that workers weren’t exactly passionate about. However, if the AI system is running the drive-thru, there’s less human work necessary, meaning that one worker may be eliminated from the schedule.
The Checkers example illustrates the shift in a microcosm: what began as a change that incited relief in the human workers on-staff in customer service positions has gradually evolved into something that breeds far more resentment and fear than it does joy among the workers.
Theory vs. Execution
What AI has proven remarkably talented at in business during its implementation is the consumption and analysis of data. AI is more adept at filling out paperwork than any human worker, able to do so in record times at mass qualities, all while adhering vehemently to the template provided. What AI has proven not nearly as skillful at is anything involving human interactions. While services such as AI Girlfriend have proven highly advanced and capable of substantially benefitting many grappling with isolation or loneliness, the technology is not yet advanced enough to fully replace interhuman interactions.
To this extent, for businesses to assume that these customer service positions (even something as simple as taking a customer’s order or working the drive-thru) are equivalent to filling out paperwork in a sterile setting is folly. Customer service positions are built upon the back of human interaction and connectivity, no matter how rigidly a given company may attempt to sterilize and streamline the experience. Customers will have questions and modifications and even require guidance to some extent, and it is in these moments that human workers can step up to the plate and deliver in abundance. In such moments, workers can forge a genuine human connection with customers, and, in turn, repeat customers occur. Emotional connections bring people back to an establishment time and again, and those connections are fostered exclusively through interhuman interactions, something overactive AI implementation will come at the cost of.
The Shop Around the Corner is over eighty years old. Yet Lubisch’s film has stood the test of time, remaining a vitally prescient and deeply moving work that embodies the emotional rollercoaster of customer service in 2024 just as it did in 1940. But with further AI advancements looming, this realm of industry looks to change fundamentally. As the human element of the customer service interaction is removed, something essential may very well be taken away with it.
