In crypto, some mistakes are permanent. Send funds to the wrong address and there's usually no one who can pull them back. Coinbase built an automated agent to handle those cases, and on paper it worked. The answers were correct.
The customers weren't satisfied, though. "An automated experience can tell a customer that they've made an irreversible error, but it cannot meet them in that moment of empathy," Wes Griffith, then Coinbase's senior director of global consumer support experience, told CX Current last November.
So his team reversed course. "We've actually pulled some of those use cases from production, and they now create an immediate express path to a human," he said. Griffith said the change produced higher satisfaction and gave specialists a chance to walk customers through what happened so they wouldn't repeat it.
The rest of the automation stayed
Coinbase kept automating almost everything else. During Griffith's time there, automated support handled close to 80% of contacts, according to his profile in CX Current's Top 50 Leaders Transforming CX '26, released this week. The irreversible-error cases were a narrow exception, and they now skip the bot.
The frontline team was renamed from agents to specialists, a nod to the product knowledge, risk awareness, and judgment the job now required. Coinbase backed the title with training. Griffith wrote on LinkedIn that about 500 specialists went through Securities Industry Essentials training as Coinbase expanded equities trading, and that certified specialists drove roughly 12% higher CSAT on trading questions.
AI stayed in the conversation after the handoff. When a case reached a specialist, the system carried over context from the automated exchange and surfaced account signals, so customers didn't have to start again. Griffith described AI to CX Current as a teammate for human agents, surfacing data in real time so people don't have to memorize a product line that keeps growing.
Griffith has been direct about what Coinbase measured. "Cost and efficiency are simply guardrail metrics for us. They are important, but they are not the point," he said. "CSAT is our number one metric." He also launched Coinbase's premium Concierge service, which he says reached more than 95% customer satisfaction in its first year.
Griffith left Coinbase in July to become vice president of member experiences at HealthEquity, after roughly five years at Coinbase and about a decade at Amazon before that. He now sums up the approach in one line: "AI in CX is not humans versus AI. It's AI handling scale and humans handling significance. But that means it's incumbent on the company to know the difference."
Gartner's advice lines up
Gartner's advice to service leaders this year reads a lot like Coinbase's playbook. In August it published a survey of 3,566 customers in which 87% said a company using generative AI for service must give them a way to reach a human. Its recommendation was not to make GenAI a mandatory first step for every issue, and to let it attempt a resolution only when its confidence is high.
A month later, Gartner found that only 27% of customers would try a chatbot again after a bad experience. When a bot can't resolve something confidently, Gartner said, it should show a visible path to a person and pass along what it has already collected. That's close to what Coinbase built.
Banks are working through the same question. In our coverage, Wipro's Alok Kumar argued that even a 99% accurate agent shouldn't move money on its own, and that the cutoff belongs wherever a mistake can't be reversed.
Where other honorees stop the bot
Griffith is one of several leaders on CX Current's list who decide case by case where automation stops.
At MetLife, Merrilee Matchett runs global customer service and operations for more than 10,000 people. She starts from the view that insurance has to feel human when customers are dealing with illness, disability, or loss, and she resists digitizing every step of the journey. Charl Lombard, chief client experience officer at Goosehead Insurance, expects AI to absorb most transactional service, but notes that speed alone isn't enough when a customer is dealing with a loss or a complicated decision.
Burgoyne Hughes, who runs GE HealthCare's customer service centers, comes at it from the other side. "You have to create an automated experience that is so smooth customers will prefer it over talking to a live person," he says. He's also wary of automation built mainly to keep customers away from service professionals.
Support you don't have to contact
Griffith's longer-term goal at Coinbase was to make support close to invisible. He told CX Current the best support experience is the one where you don't need to contact anybody, and described a test that would proactively tell users how much they could have saved on fees with a Coinbase One membership. His team also watched for systemic anomalies and individual points of friction, with a person in the loop, so problems got fixed before they turned into ticket spikes.
Griffith treated education as part of the same job, so customers would be less likely to make an irreversible mistake in the first place. "Crypto is a new frontier for a lot of people," he said. "We have a responsibility to help people navigate that in a trusted way."
He's now at HealthEquity, which administers health savings accounts and other benefits. The rest of the Top 50 Leaders Transforming CX '26, including profiles of each honoree, is on CX Current.
The Top 50 Leaders Transforming CX '26 awards are presented by CX Current in partnership with Cresta.
