Over the years, we’ve spoken with countless businesses across multiple industries.

And every time we strike up a conversation, we ask a lot of questions, because we’re

constantly on the lookout for new ways we can use technology to improve the customer

experience. During these conversations, however, we began to notice a troubling

theme. While businesses were generally quite confident about the customer support

they were delivering, they weren’t seeing the results they expected. Satisfaction levels

were low, customers weren’t always embracing new services, and in some cases, the

businesses were actually losing customers. We knew something was terribly wrong.

So, we asked Dimensional Research to see if they could explain this growing trend,

because we wanted to see if we could do something about it.

When Dimensional Research completed its study, the findings were telling. One of them,

however, stood out like a flashing red light. Customers aren’t nearly as happy with the

support they are getting as businesses think they are. And there’s a pretty big gap

between the surveyed companies’ own perception of their customer service and what

their customers think about it. Even worse, the study indicated that an alarming number

of these companies were losing customers as a result of their poor support. We also

uncovered another troubling truth. AI and virtual agents still lag far behind humans

when it comes to providing a satisfying experience. When asked, almost all customers

still preferred working with a live person.