I wasn’t expecting to be so surprised this summer, when my team and I did some research into all that’s changing for customer experience and customer support leaders, especially in mid-market and enterprise businesses in eCommerce, Retail and SaaS.

Envoy works with (literally) hundreds of Customer Experience (CX), Customer Support (CS), and Customer Service executives at those kinds of companies. And they tell us every day that their credibility and impact have never been challenged more than they are right now.

…Still, I was shocked.

Following are the 11 statistics that gave me the most pause.

CS and CX resources are dwindling as fast as buyer & employee requests grow. (And the bar isn’t getting any lower.)

We all know how much the pandemic catapulted buyer expectations and made it tough to efficiently manage distributed teams. Since then, budget cuts, RIFs, and the tidal wave of AI have layered on even more complexity.

1. Customer support tickets ballooned 30% in 2022¹, up from 16% growth in 2021².

2. Employee requests of support teams in 2022 grew 70%³.

Think about that for a minute. Companies with 100 customer support tickets and 100 internal requests each day in 2021 received 300 total daily requests in 2022.

And that doesn’t even begin to quantify how many they’re getting right now.

More with less, anyone?

While there’s no question that CX resources need to be redistributed, most leaders have no idea which investments to optimize (or nix).

CX and CS leaders know they need new ways to systematically delight buyers and keep teams energized right now. But…

3. 60% of executives don’t know what drives current CX performance, and they can’t prove the business impact of changes⁴.

4. Just 6% of CX leaders trust their current systems to enable good decisions ⁵.

With those statistics in mind, imagine being a CX leader at the revenue table as marketing and sales executives present the state of the company pipeline. The CMO and CSO talk easily about conversion rate improvements to the business, as well as impacts of competitive intelligence and product launches. They present new hypotheses on the value of planned upsell experiments and tactics to harness other market trends.

The last thing a CX leader feels in that situation is savvy and confident.

Customer churn and cart abandonment rates illuminate how poorly today’s CX programs perform.

There’s been a lot of change in CX over the last decade, and it’s easy to blame CX technology for the fact that today:

5. SaaS churn averages 80%⁶, and cart abandonment hovers near 70%⁷.

Sure, some support systems simply weren’t set up right to begin with, and others haven’t evolved with modern requirements. Whatever the cause, today’s customer experience programs annoy customers and are a nightmare for CS teams to use.

6. In fact, Forrester’s CX Index plummeted for the first time in seven years in 2022.⁸

There’s a reason that U.S. companies lost $1.6T to poor customer experiences in 2022⁹, and that loss points to why…

7. One in five CX programs will disappear in 2023, and only one in 10 will be stronger than ever¹⁰.

Today’s CX crisis will snowball, as competition gets more intense.

It’s well known that 80% of buyers switch vendors after one poor experience¹¹, and that 93% pay more for great ones¹². That’s another way of saying that the companies that figure their customer experience out have a major competitive advantage. BUT…

8. Since 2020, the number of companies invested in CX have quadrupled from 20% to 80%.¹³

Have your team made your customer experience four times better since 2020? I hope so, because CX programs are competing in a world with a LOT more players, for the same number of slots on the team.

While fixing the customer experience is easy to prioritize “tomorrow,” execs who wait risk becoming irrelevant – or worse.

While technology has accelerated other go-to-market teams’ ability to secure a holistic picture of the customer, CS and CX teams (and tech stacks!) struggle to keep pace.

9. Only 20% of CX professionals have the skills to execute on strategic priorities like institutionalizing artificial intelligence (AI) or accelerating customer insights to demonstrably impact the business¹⁴.

Few quantum shifts have challenged CX’s impact and credibility like generative AI, especially compared to other go-to-market executives’ readiness.

Most CX executives are way too confident in their ability to incorporate AI.

According to an IBM Institute for Business Value study of 1,200 executives…

10. The majority of today’s CX leaders overestimate having a strong foundation for a robust CX/AI program, such as CX governance & clean customer data. And they unrealistically assume that they can train or hire for skills.¹⁵

Envoy sees this a lot. Very few CX teams know how to craft and execute a generative AI roadmap that scalably delivers business impact – while reimagining their teams, processes, and technology to keep their jobs. It’s just too much to ask of any one leader.

There’s light at the end of the CX tunnel.

While CX leaders who wait to respond to today’s CX trends risk being replaced, out-sourced, or automated, those who figure things out win in the market and rise to the top in their careers.

11. Companies that invest in AI for CX see a revenue uplift of 3-15% and a sales ROI uplift of 10-20%¹⁶.

Want to learn the most pragmatic ways that market leaders are forging ahead to make today’s rapid changes their competitive advantage?

Schedule time to learn how Envoy can help your team transform CX. Or read, “3 Enterprise Benefits When Envoy Is Your SI Partner.”

¹ https://www.zendesk.com/blog/customer-service-trends/
² https://www.trustradius.com/buyer-blog/help-desk-statistics
³ https://www.zendesk.com/it/newsroom/articles/zendesk-for-better-internal-support/
⁴ https://www.forrester.com/blogs/low-measurement-maturity-remains-a-challenge-for-cx-leaders/
⁵ https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/prediction-the-future-of-cx
⁶ https://www.omniconvert.com/blog/churn-risk-factors
⁷ https://www.hotjar.com/blog/cart-abandonment-stats
⁸ https://www.forrester.com/blogs/customer-experience-trends-2023
⁹ https://www.midlandstech.edu/news/true-cost-poor-customer-service-your-business
¹⁰ https://www.forrester.com/blogs/predictions-2023-customer-experience-cx
¹¹ https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/qualtrics-servicenow-customer-service-research
¹² https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-acquisition-study
¹³ https://www.pwc.com/us/en/retail-consumer/publications/assets/pwc-retailing-2020.pdf
¹⁴ https://www.forrester.com/blogs/customer-experience-trends-2023
¹⁵ https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/ai-customer-experience
¹⁶ https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/ai-powered-marketing-and-sales-reach-new-heights-with-generative-ai