Consumer expectations for customer service have accelerated sharply, yet businesses are failing to keep pace. A Verint survey of 5,000 respondents reveals that 51% of consumers now say companies are falling short of their expectations—up from 46% in 2025—whilst 42% report their own expectations have increased over the past year. The stakes are existential: 80% of consumers will make another purchase after an exceptional experience, but an identical proportion will defect to competitors after a poor one. Despite this clarity, support teams remain caught between competing pressures. Consumers overwhelmingly prefer live agents (61%, up 5% year-on-year), yet two-thirds of those same consumers would abandon human support entirely if automation could resolve their issue. This paradox reflects a fundamental shift in customer psychology: people expect the responsiveness and instant access they've grown accustomed to from consumer AI tools, but they want the reassurance of human escalation paths when complexity demands it.
The implementation gap is where most organisations are stumbling. Gartner's analysis confirms that AI isn't displacing agents at scale, yet teams are struggling to extract value from AI-supported workflows despite documented time savings. This suggests the problem isn't technological—it's operational. Support leaders deploying Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Salesforce Service Cloud are acquiring the capability to blend automation and human routing, but many lack the process maturity or change management discipline to operationalise it effectively. The question facing CX teams isn't whether to invest in AI orchestration, but whether their current platform architecture and team structure can actually execute the nuanced handoffs consumers now demand. With 79% of consumers acknowledging AI's benefits for resolution speed and availability, the competitive disadvantage falls entirely on organisations that fail to implement these capabilities—not on those that do.
Exceptional customer service wins loyalty, but businesses are missing the mark Customer Experience Dive
Exceptional customer service wins loyalty, but businesses are missing the mark Yahoo Tech