@Adam Bengal @Aleksei O great thread, and that longer-tenured user stat is really the key data point here.
The 30% gap between new and tenured users isn't surprising — it's actually a well-documented trust pattern. Newer users have no prior expectation of how your support *should* feel. Tenured users do. They built a relationship with your team over years, and Fin — however good — doesn't feel like that relationship. So they route around it.
A few things worth trying, roughly in order of effort:
1. Don't hide the human path — make it part of the flow
If tenured users feel like they have to "defeat" Fin to reach a person, they'll skip the channel entirely. The fix is to make human handoff a first-class option, not a fallback. In Workflows you can build a path that shows a "Talk to someone on our team" button *alongside* Fin's answer — Fin still handles it first, but the escape valve is visible and immediate. Aleksei's point about "human still accessible but question asked to AI at all times" is exactly right — it's about reducing the *perceived* cost of trying Fin, not forcing compliance.
The "Ask for more information before handover" setting in Fin's workflow config is also worth enabling — it creates a natural bridge where Fin gathers context before passing to a human, which actually improves the human agent experience too.
2. Address the trust gap with personalisation, not just content
Generic answers erode trust faster with tenured users because they *know* your product well enough to spot when an answer is boilerplate. Aleksei nailed this — using customer data in responses (account type, plan, usage history) via Fin's Data Connectors or Procedures makes answers feel specific and earns more trust than a well-written-but-generic article citation. Even something as simple as Fin referencing the customer's plan name in its response changes the perceived quality significantly.
3. Reframe the email concern
I understand the instinct — responding to "they're avoiding AI" with "more AI on email" feels tone-deaf. But I'd reframe it: the problem isn't AI, it's *uncontrolled* AI. Email is actually a lower-friction channel for tenured users precisely because they feel in control — they write on their terms and expect a considered reply. Fin over email, configured with a clear human handoff and a warm tone, can match that expectation. The key is making Fin's email replies feel like a thoughtful first response from your team, not an autoresponder. You can tune this heavily with guidance and persona settings.
4. Look at what Fin is *not* resolving for tenured users specifically
The Analyze tab will show you resolution rates, but try filtering or tagging conversations by customer tenure if you can. My guess is tenured users are asking a different *category* of question — more nuanced, more product-specific, less FAQ-shaped. That's a content/Procedures gap more than a trust gap. If Fin can't answer their questions, of course they go to phone.
5. Invest in how Fin sounds, not just what it knows
This one's underrated, especially for the tenured-user trust problem. Intercom published two pieces worth reading together on this.
The first, by Kate Sugrue on https://ideas.fin.ai/p/a-name-you-can-trust-the-case-for, looks at how customers form a trust judgement before they've even read Fin's first response — within seconds of seeing the agent's name and opener. She analysed naming patterns across thousands of Fin deployments and found that the right signal for a tech/SaaS context (like yours) tends to be functional and product-aligned rather than humanised — but the key insight is that this decision is rarely deliberate, and it should be.
The second, published this week by Intercom's Fred Walton on https://www.intercom.com/blog/conversation-design-for-your-ai-agent/, makes the business case for owning how your AI Agent communicates — not just what it knows. The stat that stood out: Intercom A/B tested two opening messages for Fin, one warm and conversational, one their old default. The conversational greeting lifted CSAT from 72.8% to 78.4% — a single change to the first thing a customer sees.
For your longer-tenured users who are actively avoiding Fin, the content gap may be less of the problem than the *experience* gap — the way Fin sounds compared to the team they've been talking to for years. Tone, response structure, how handoffs are communicated — these are all configurable through Fin's Guidance settings, and they don't require new knowledge, just someone who owns how Fin sounds. If nobody on your team has formally defined Fin's voice, that's probably worth doing before anything else.
Does yours have a name or is it fin?
---
Curious what the Analyze tab is showing as the top unresolved topics — that would tell you a lot about whether this is a trust problem or a capability problem (or both).
