Customer Satisfaction with Contact Centers Continues to Slide

Last year, 55 percent of consumers said their experiences with businesses were getting worse. This year, that number has climbed to 59 percent, according to CCW Digital research. It was 57 percent in CCW’s 2023 survey.

The regression is unsurprising, according to Brian Cantor, managing director of the Customer Management Practice’s digital division, which includes CCW Digital.

“In addition to experiencing many of the same pain points they have for years, including wait times, repetitive questions, and impersonal interactions, consumers are encountering new challenges and reservations related to artificial intelligence (AI),” Cantor says.

Some of the newest pain points include unhelpful automation and a growing disillusionment with artificial intelligence. Additionally, consumers still prefer human agents, yet they increasingly describe them as unenthusiastic, undertrained, and disengaged.

“Although they prefer employees to chatbots, consumers are not over the moon about the care they receive from agents. The majority believe today’s agents lack enthusiasm, knowledge, and focus for the brands, issues, and customers they are serving,” Cantor says.

While AI has automated many processes with the goal of facilitating customer interactions, companies are not doing enough to “compete on the customer experience,” Cantor explains. “They are not doing enough to make their promises of customer-centricity a reality.”

The majority of consumers don’t think that their brand interactions are personalized, consistent, or convenient, according to Cantor. Many issues cited in previous surveys have yet to be solved. Mirroring the 2024 survey, more than 40 percent of customers frequently face difficulty reaching a live agent, long wait times, unhelpful automation tools, and repetitive questioning.

These are more than simply inconveniences for consumers; they have negative reputational results for companies. More than 57 percent will communicate their frustration to family, friends, and/or coworkers, and nearly 53 percent will try switching to a competitor.

One of the biggest complaints customers have is with the technology that was supposed to help them.

“Considering just 15 percent trust chatbots for customer service (compared with 17 percent in 2024), this overreliance on AI feels particularly anti-customer,” Cantor says. “The disappointment goes beyond chatbots; in general, just 29 percent feel AI has thus far elevated customer experiences.”

And then, 91 percent of consumers feel companies are forcing them to use AI-based self-service.

However, there are some consumers who remain optimistic about the technology, Cantor adds. Though they have not yet seen a positive impact, 36 percent believe one might be coming.

To obtain more of the promised benefits of AI, CCW recommends the following:

• Keep agents at the center of the experience.The majority of consumers identify difficulty reaching a live agent as a pain point. Most distrust chatbots but say that providing a seamless escalation experience would grow their confidence. Whether to support those who refuse to self-serve or help those who can’t self-serve, agents will remain the lifeblood of the customer contact function.
• Emphasize AI-human collaboration.Rather than attempting to fully automate and entirely shift agents to other roles, pursue a middle ground, CCW says. “Use AI to simplify some aspects of the interaction, while still enabling agents to step in and support as needed. This will help introduce customers to the potential upside of AI, while still helping agents demonstrate more efficiency, focus, and personalization.”
• Commit to conversation.The majority of today’s chatbots are little more than fancy, rules-based FAQ pages, according to CCW. “By harnessing the power of modern conversational, generative, and agentic AI solutions, brands can close this gap and create the kinds of convenient, relevant, and valuable experiences that will actually build trust in automation.” Voice AI offers a particularly promising opportunity for supporting organic conversation, honoring the preference for voice communication, and elevating the customer contact operation, Cantor says.
• Be transparent. To improve customer trust and adoption, Cantor recommends that companies be transparent about when they are using AI. They will also have to enable customers to seamlessly escalate to a live agent, while accommodating natural language within the automated interface.

“An emphasis on voice AI may also help, as consumers are warmer on that technology than they are on text-based chatbots,” Cantor says.