It should capture them, route them and acknowledge them properly. It should not try to resolve them.
That distinction is where most deployments get this wrong, and getting it wrong is expensive, because a complaint mishandled by a machine becomes a complaint about the machine on top of the original problem.
Why automation is poor at this specifically
A complaint is rarely only about the facts.
Somebody is annoyed, often for accumulated reasons rather than the single incident they are describing. What they usually want first is acknowledgement that something went wrong, from someone who can do something about it.
Accuracy benchmarks make the point. Well-defined factual tasks run around 98% accuracy. Ambiguous, emotionally loaded scenarios drop to roughly 61%. That is not a model that needs improving, it is a category of conversation where the difficulty is not informational.
Add the trust trend. The share of people saying AI-led service costs a business their trust moved from 47% to 57% in eight months. An unhappy customer discovering they are talking to software rather than a person is a compounding problem.
What it should do instead
Real work, none of it resolution.
Detect early. Explicit words are easy. The valuable signals are subtler: a customer who has contacted you three times about the same issue, an unusually long message, language carrying frustration. Recontact history is often the strongest indicator and it is already in your systems.
Capture properly. What happened, when, what they have already tried, what outcome they want. Gathered patiently, without the customer having to compress it into a form field.
Pull the context. Account history, previous tickets, previous complaints, what was promised last time. The person picking this up should not be starting cold.
Route to the right team. Not a general queue where a serious complaint sits behind twenty password resets.
Acknowledge honestly. Confirm it has been logged, say who is picking it up, give a realistic timeframe. Then meet it.
The handover is the whole thing
A complaint handed over badly is worse than one that never touched an agent.
"I'll connect you to someone who can help", then a wait, then a person asking them to explain it all again, takes someone who was annoyed about one thing and gives them a second thing to be annoyed about.
Done properly the human opens with the customer identified, the issue documented, the history attached and the transcript there. Their first sentence can be about the problem rather than about who the customer is.
The narrow exception
Where the fix is factual, verifiable and within an agreed limit.
A billing error the agent can confirm against the system and correct, immediately, is better service than a two-day queue. The customer wanted the money back, not a conversation about their feelings.
The test is whether resolving it needs judgment. If it does, it is not the agent's to resolve, however clearly the customer has explained it.
What this is really worth
Not deflection. Complaints should not be deflected.
The value is that they get captured consistently, routed correctly, and arrive with a person who can act instead of someone who has to start by working out what happened. That shortens resolution time, which is the thing complainants actually judge you on.
And it means complaints stop being lost at 9pm on a Sunday, which in most operations is where a meaningful share of them currently go.
