Consumers & CX: Where the Disconnects LieConsumers & CX: Where the Disconnects Lie

Ask IT or CX leaders how their companies are doing in delivering on customer experience excellence, and most will give their customer service departments high fives. However, ask the same of consumers about the companies they do business with, and the responses won’t be quite as positive.

Metrigy’s recent CX research studies with businesses and consumers tell the tale in numbers. In our “Customer Experience Optimization: 2024-25” research study, we see that a whopping 91.3% of the 544 IT/CX respondents believe their companies deliver excellent customer service—if not for nearly every interaction (37.3%), then at least for some interactions (54.0%). And they’re quite confident that their customers feel about the same way. Nearly 61% say their customers would rate their service as “good,” while 35.3% feel their companies would receive an “excellent” rating.

By contrast, of the 502 U.S.-based consumers we studied, only 14.7% deemed the customer service they receive as excellent. Far more—40.6%—gave companies a “good” nod, while only slightly fewer than that—36.3%—handed out a “fair” rating.

The differences in perception around CX don’t stop there. For example, the gap between overall business and consumer perspectives on whether customer service is improving is vast. While 78.2% of CX/IT leaders say their customer service has improved in the past 12 months, only 31.5% of consumers say the same. The remaining consumers are split on whether service has gotten worse or hasn’t changed.

That many consumers aren’t able to discern improvements or feel that service has degraded isn’t great news for companies investing in technologies aimed at improving CX. Simply thinking a CX transformation initiative has resulted in success—as 63.1% of companies that undertook such a project believe—isn’t enough. Only those IT/CX leaders who define overarching business success metrics as well as more granular key performance indicators and measure the before-and-after effect of a technology implementation on them can truly lay claim to CX success, or not!

Even as less than a third of consumers say their overall customer service experience has improved, more than half (57.2%) indicate that they’ve seen a positive impact of technology on their interactions. But technology is only one variable in the CX equation and, as it happens, of less weight than another: people. The vast majority of consumers, just shy of 80%, say the people they interact with are more important than the technology in use.

Age matters in this regard. Consumers between the ages of 18 and 24 years old—Gen Z, loosely—are evenly split on the “people vs. technology” question of importance to CX. From there, we see a linear progression: The older people get, the more they say people create positive experiences, and the less they see tools/technology as creating the same.

Source: Metrigy's Customer Experience Optimization: 2024-25 - Consumer Views research study

On this question, most CX/IT leaders agree, with 71.6% saying that while both are important, the people factor has the edge over technology. This is understandable. A lot can be forgiven when technology goes haywire as long as the human agent involved is empathetic, helpful, polite, pleasant, and such. Compound bad technology with poor people skills and any interaction is certain to get a failing mark, so to speak.

With the people being of greater importance than technology, it’s no surprise that two of the top three actions consumers say businesses can take to improve customer service are people related. To 60.0%, hiring more knowledgeable people is the ticket to better CX. To 38.8%, hiring friendlier people is the way to go. (In between, for 56.8%, is reducing hold times.)

In CX, the future is all about AI, which is manifested in quite a variety of ways, starting in many cases with the use of agent assist and customer-facing virtual agents and spiraling out from there. The good news is, looking ahead, consumers seem willing to give the benefit of the doubt on AI. While a sizable chunk, 29.7% say they still don’t trust AI, more than half trust it for at least some purposes (44.8%) or fully (14.1%).

And the really good news? Within two years, nearly half (48.8%) of consumers studied say they expect to see AI impact customer service in a positive way. Will AI use shift the balance between the importance of people and technology for CX? We’ll have to wait a year or three to see.