A few weeks ago, I met with the CEO of a large company.
He proudly described the investments they had made in customer service: faster response times, AI-powered support, better customer satisfaction scores, and continuous improvements to the customer experience.
Then I asked one question.
“What happens when a customer is no longer looking for service, but believes they’ve been treated unfairly?”
The room went quiet.
That conversation wasn’t unique. I’ve had versions of it with many CEOs and customer service leaders over the past year.
And it has led me to a simple conclusion:
Customer service and customer dispute resolution are not the same thing.
My experience as a business mediator has taught me that conflicts rarely begin with money. More often, people want to be heard. They want someone to understand their perspective. Above all, they want to feel that the process is fair.
Only then do they begin talking about compensation.
The same pattern appears in the relationship between businesses and customers.
Customer service is designed to answer questions, solve problems, and provide fast support.
Dispute resolution is different.
The customer is no longer asking:
“Can you solve my problem?”
They’re asking:
“Will you treat me fairly?”
This distinction is supported by decades of research. In Procedural Justice: A Psychological Analysis (1975), John Thibaut and Laurens Walker demonstrated that people’s willingness to accept a decision depends not only on the outcome itself, but also on the fairness of the process that leads to it. Tom R. Tyler later expanded this work, showing that people are far more willing to accept even unfavorable outcomes when they believe the process was respectful, impartial, and gave them a genuine opportunity to be heard.
Yet most organizations still handle disputes using the same tools they built for customer service: support agents, supervisors, email exchanges, and eventually legal departments.
Perhaps that’s why so many companies excel at customer service, yet still struggle when customer relationships turn into conflicts.
As AI rapidly transforms customer interactions, most discussions focus on speed, automation, and cost reduction.
Those are important goals.
But they may not be the most important opportunity.
The more interesting question is whether AI can help businesses and customers reach fair agreements before disagreements become lawsuits, public complaints, or permanently damaged relationships.
If that becomes possible, AI won’t just improve customer service.
It will fundamentally change how businesses resolve conflicts.
Over the coming months, I’ll explore this idea through research, conversations with business leaders, and insights from business mediation.
I have a feeling we’re witnessing the emergence of an entirely new discipline.
References
Thibaut, J., & Walker, L. (1975). Procedural Justice: A Psychological Analysis. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Lind, E. A., & Tyler, T. R. (1988). The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice. Plenum Press.
Tyler, T. R. (2000). “Social Justice: Outcome and Procedure.” International Journal of Psychology, 35(2), 117–125.
