Artificial intelligence can now transcribe customer calls, score employee performance, detect keywords, summarize conversations and analyze thousands of interactions in seconds.

But does that mean companies are becoming better listeners—or simply better at measuring people?

In this episode of The Synthetic Echo, Nathan Graham sits down with author, speaker and customer-experience researcher Tom Vander Well, who has spent more than three decades studying what really happens when businesses and customers meet in conversation.

After analyzing more than 100,000 recorded business calls, Tom has witnessed the exact moments when trust is created, damaged and sometimes completely lost. He has heard frustrated customers pushed from one representative to another, frontline employees trapp ...