What Tandem Care Feels Like When You’re the Customer

Key Takeaways: 

Avaya Global VP of Marketing Candace Sheitelman shares why tandem care matters in CX today, using her own customer service experiences to show what happens when AI and human support work together with context.

• The best AI-powered customer experiences help customers feel understood, not routed through disconnected systems.
• Tandem care brings AI, data, workflows, and human agents together so customers can get the right help without starting over.

I woke up on New Year’s Day to my phone vibrating with fraud alerts.

Seventeen charges to Sephora.com. One after another. Some around $40. Some closer to $400. All happening while I was very much not shopping for skincare.

That is the kind of moment when customer experience stops being a strategy discussion and becomes personal. You’re not thinking about AI, automation, or what contact center platform a company uses. You’re thinking: someone has my card, this is going to ruin my morning, and I need someone to help me fix it.

The surprise was that the experience didn’t feel chaotic. It felt coordinated.

The virtual agent helped collect the basics. The human agent who joined already had the context, and I didn’t have to start over, repeat the same information, or wonder whether the person on the other end understood what had happened.

That continuity is what made the experience memorable. 

I spend my days marketing Avaya’s customer experience and critical communications platforms, so I pay close attention to what it feels like to be on the receiving end of service. I guess you could say it’s in my blood after all these years.

I pay attention not as a marketer doing competitive research. Not as an analyst benchmarking a platform. Not as someone looking for a use case.

Just as a person with a problem, trying to get it solved.

And these recent experiences reminded me that the real test of tandem care, Avaya’s view of how AI and human agents should work together, is what it feels like when you’re the customer.

The Best AI Experience is Usually the One You Barely Notice

There is a lot of conversation right now about AI in customer experience. Some of it is exciting. Some of it is overhyped. And some of it misses the point.

Customers, myself included, don’t judge AI by whether it is impressive. We judge it by whether it helps us get to the right outcome without more effort.

When I need help, I don’t want to be trapped in automation or repeat the same information three times. I don’t want to explain the issue to a virtual agent, then explain it again to a live agent, then find out the second person can’t see what happened in the first interaction.

I want the experience to move with me.

That’s why I think tandem care matters in CX today. It’s about designing AI, data, workflows, and human support to work together so the customer feels known, helped, and understood.

The Fraud Alert That Showed Me What Good CX Feels Like 

To be clear, I have nothing against someone who genuinely needs to make 17 purchases on Sephora.com in a single day. That person has a full life, and I respect it.

That person was simply not me.

The charges came through in rapid succession, at an hour when I was not awake, not online, and very much not in the middle of a beauty haul. Someone had my card number, a taste for skincare, and apparently a lot of energy for a holiday morning.

This is exactly the kind of situation where the wrong customer service experience can make everything worse.

You are already rattled. It is a holiday. You assume you are about to spend the first morning of the new year on hold, explaining the situation from scratch to someone who sounds like they would rather be anywhere else, then waiting days for a resolution while your card sits frozen.

That is not what happened.

I called. The virtual agent walked me through the fraud report clearly and quickly. It did not make me feel like a suspect. It collected what it needed: confirmation that the charges were not mine, the date range, and my current location. It told me the account was being flagged and that someone would be with me shortly.

The agent who picked up was, I have to say, remarkably pleasant for someone working a fraud line on New Year’s Day. I told her as much. She laughed and said she already had what she needed on her screen.

That was the moment I really noticed the experience.

Not because it felt like AI. Because it did not feel like I was starting over.

She confirmed the charges, walked me through the disputed transactions, explained when the provisional credits would post, and told me a new card was already being issued. The whole call took maybe ten minutes.

I do not know exactly what systems were working behind the scenes, and I would not pretend to. But I know what the experience felt like. The automation gathered what it needed. The human agent had context. The handoff did not feel like a handoff. It felt like continuity.

She handled the human part, which in this case was mostly being a calm, kind presence for someone who had started the year staring at charges from someone else’s beauty haul.

I hung up and made coffee.

It was still New Year’s Day, and that could have gone a whole lot worse.

The Insurance Claim That Did Not Make Me Start Over

The second experience was more emotional. 

I had just gotten a new car. The kind of purchase that comes with a very specific, irrational anxiety about the first scratch, the first door ding, the first anything. I had owned it for less than a week when someone changed lanes right into me.

If you’ve ever gotten a new car, you know the administrative weight that comes with it. New insurance policy. New coverage details. New app. New card. New everything.

I was still in that orientation phase when I suddenly needed to use the insurance I had just set up. The timing was terrible.

And anyone who has filed an auto insurance claim knows what that process can feel like: long hold times, repeating yourself to multiple people, waiting for a follow-up, and wondering whether the claim is actually moving.

Again, that is not what happened.

When I called, a virtual agent walked me through a few direct questions, confirmed the basics, and told me a claim was being opened. By the time I connected with a human agent, she already knew who I was, what had happened, and what my new policy covered.

I didn’t repeat everything, and it didn’t feel like she was reading a script. She led with acknowledgment that this had clearly been a rough week and that she was going to make this part of it easier.

That mattered.

This was not just a transaction. It was stressful, inconvenient, and expensive. It required judgment, reassurance, and next steps that actually made sense.

The human agent handled the emotional part of the interaction. The technology seemed to handle the context and coordination around her. Together, the experience gave me something neither could have delivered alone.

That, to me, is the point.

What These Experiences Taught Me About My Own Work 

I have written the phrase “AI and human agents working together” many times. I’ve worked on presentations, messaging, and conversations around tandem care and understand “the concept” professionally. However, experiencing it as a customer sharpened the message for me.

The moments that stayed with me were those of visible competence. An agent who already had the right information. A conversation that moved forward instead of circling. A problem that was resolved in one interaction instead of becoming my new part-time job.

The technology did its job because I didn’t have to think about it. As someone who has spent decades in marketing, I can tell you that it is something much harder to market than a feature list even if it’s much closer to what customers actually value.

People don’t want to be impressed by a contact center platform. They want to be helped. They want the company to know enough to act. They want the person on the other end of the interaction to have the context, tools, and authority to solve the problem.

That is why tandem care matters.

Why Tandem Care Matters in CX Today

Customer expectations around AI are complicated, but they are not contradictory.

People are open to AI when it helps them resolve an issue quickly. According to Avaya’s 2026 Signals of Connection Report, 56% of consumers are satisfied with AI assistance as long as it resolves their issue quickly. At the same time, 83% say speaking with a human agent is extremely or very important, and 70% expect AI support tools to remember their past interaction history.

Customers don’t necessarily reject AI. They reject bad automation, bots that cannot help, and dead-end self-service. They reject being transferred to a human who has no idea what just happened.

The failure point is often the transition between automation and human support.

Tandem care is designed for that moment. It brings AI and human agents together in a coordinated model where each plays the role that makes sense. AI can gather context, summarize information, support self-service, recommend next steps, and execute routine tasks. Human agents can bring empathy, judgment, accountability, and creative problem-solving.

When those pieces work together, AI can make human interaction better.

How Avaya Infinity Supports Tandem Care

Avaya Infinity is built around this idea: customer experience should not be fragmented across channels, systems, AI tools, and human teams.

For tandem care to work, AI needs context. Human agents need context. Workflows need to move during the interaction, not after it. Customer history, enterprise data, and next steps need to come together in real time.

That is the role of Avaya Infinity. It helps enterprises bring AI, human agents, data, and workflows into one coordinated customer experience model. It supports conversational AI, agent assist, agentic AI, enterprise data activation, and workflow orchestration in an environment where organizations can maintain control over governance, deployment, and AI strategy.

The goal is to apply the right resource at the right moment. Sometimes that will be self-service, and sometimes that will be a human agent. Oftentimes, it will be both working together in ways the customer never has to see.

The Customer Hat is Worth Wearing More Often

These experiences reminded me that customer experience strategy should be tested against real customer moments.

• Did the customer have to repeat themselves?
• Did the human agent have context?
• Did the interaction move forward?
• Did the company make the problem easier to solve?
• Did the technology help the person, or did it get in the way?

That is the standard that matters.

The future of CX is not AI instead of people. It is AI that helps people show up better when customers need them most.

And when tandem care works, that is exactly what the customer feels.

Explore how Avaya Infinity supports tandem care with AI, human agents, and enterprise data working as one connected CX model