The State of Digital Customer Experience Report 2024

In last year’s report, we declared that “AI is no longer the future. It’s here.” Fast forward twelve months, and artificial intelligence has come to the masses.

So, what does this mean for customer experience (CX)? Has the widespread adoption of powerful automation raised the bar for consumer expectations? How must businesses evolve to keep pace?

As CX becomes increasingly digital, the pressure to stay ahead of technological advancements is mounting. The shift to digital channels is no longer a mere trend but a crucial strategy for survival in competitive markets.

We’ll explore all of this and more in this year’s State of Digital Customer Experience, drawing on survey data from 450 industry leaders and 1,500 customers to provide valuable insights to help guide your CX strategy today and for years to come.

The Verint State of Digital Customer Experience 2024 analyzes the changing customer preferences and behaviors that impact customer experience strategies for enterprise brands.

This report provides a comprehensive overview of customer expectations and analyzes the top CX priorities for large enterprises, including how AI is impacting contact center operations.

It explores the best practices that separate the industry leaders from the rest, allowing you to see where competitors are focusing their efforts and budgets.

Customer Trend 1: Your customers want answers now; they don’t care how

We begin with a watershed moment. For the first time in the history of this report, digital channels have overtaken phone as customers’ preferred channel for asking questions (increasing 16-points from 45% in 2023).
Contact center operations have traditionally been telephony-first with digital channels somewhat of an afterthought. It is time to flip that idea on its head.

Although more customers prefer digital channels to ask questions, it’s not time to cut the cord
on phone—far from it. On average, customers interacted on two of these three channel types in the last 12 months. Channel preferences vary, and brands need to be flexible, using a customer experience (CX) platform that makes it easy to meet customers on their channel of choice.

When asked to rank important aspects of good CX, respondents overwhelmingly want one thing—speed (87%). They also care about their query being resolved (74%) and are keen to engage on the channel of their choice (67%). However, 20% or fewer of our respondents selected the technicalities of how their issues are resolved as being an important aspect of good CX. This indicates that they don’t place importance on what’s going on under the hood; they are looking for outcomes.

Customer Trend 2: Terrible CX risks losing 70% of your customers

We know that a good customer experience is quick, easy, and on a preferred channel. What does that mean in terms of opportunities and risks for businesses getting it right or wrong? A terrible experience likely leads customers to switch to a competitor (70%) and/or tell friends and family to not purchase from the company (65%). With a high risk of losing future business, it’s vital to understand what customers consider to be poor CX.

The results shouldn’t come as a surprise. The aspects of poor CX are essentially what makes good CX but flipped on its head—it takes multiple attempts to get an answer (63%), customers can’t get an immediate resolution (43%), and they can’t contact the company on their channel of choice (39%).

While terrible digital customer experiences can have severe consequences, the potential upside of amazing CX is huge. If customers have an amazing experience, they’re likely to purchase from the same company (85%) and/or recommend them to a family member or friend (75%). To put it simply, this is the opportunity for businesses to shift CX from being a cost center to a revenue driver.

Customer Trend 3: Customers want better bots for self-service

Bad chatbots and automated phone menus (IVRs) may deliver the immediacy customers demand when reaching out to a business, but they often fail when resolving issues. They can’t always answer customer questions or even understand what customers need.

Similarly, bad automated phone menus don’t always provide the service that customers want. Ideally, if an issue can’t be resolved, these solutions should seamlessly transfer to a live agent, but almost half of our respondents had used chatbots that didn’t provide that as an option.

AI powered chatbots can deliver the most important aspects of good CX—speed and issue resolution. It’s clearly a light-bulb moment for customers. Of the respondents who have used an AI-powered chatbot, 70% cite at least one benefit of using them, with 52% saying that it, “saves time and resolves issues faster.”

There’s an old business adage that you can have fast, cheap, and good, but you can only pick two. Chatbots and automated phone menus have always been fast, they’ve always been cheaper than hiring more agents, but they’re not always good. Customers are frustrated by poor experiences that fail to resolve their issues or waste their time by failing to hand them over to a human agent when needed.

Verint Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) helps solve these issues, leveraging proprietary, commercial, and the brand’s current AI models to finally enable brands to deliver self-service that is fast, affordable, and effective.

Its AI models are trained on decades of rich customer engagement data as well as each business’ unique data to accurately understand customer intents and continually improve over time. By knowing why a customer is reaching out, the assistant can resolve issues more efficiently and
effectively, helping to increase containment rates, or use AI-powered routing to pass the interaction to the most suitable human agent—helping to improve first contact resolution.

What’s even better is that Verint IVA can be built once and then deployed across voice and digital channels, facilitating a seamless experience regardless of the channel a customer chooses.

There are hundreds of emerging use cases for AI in the contact center, and delivering seamless customer experiences at scale with intelligent virtual assistants and augmenting your human agents with AI-powered workflows can be achieved right now to address evolving customer expectations.

Business Trend 1: Businesses are investing big in AI

AI technology is no longer on the horizon. It’s already at the heart of CX strategy for over half of businesses surveyed, with just 1% not using it or even considering it.

The majority of businesses (66%) expect to increase their spending on technology over the next 12 months. This rises to 84% for businesses that say AI is already key part of their CX strategy. Businesses are reaping the benefits of CX automation, and it’s giving them the confidence to invest more in the future.

Industry leaders told us that AI technology will have the biggest impact on their CX strategy over the next year, specifically improving workforce management and augmenting customer experience.

Business Trend 2: Business want to deliver AI outcomes

When we dig into the individual applications of AI, we see the specific challenges that businesses are aiming to solve. The three most selected options (AI-powered bots for self-service [60%], automated customer interaction routing [53%], and automated contextual knowledge for agents [47%]) align with what customers want from their CX—improving first contact resolution and reducing average handle time.

Business Trend 1: Businesses are investing big in AI

Business Trend 2: Businesses want to deliver AI outcomes

Businesses are clearly confident in AI.

The surge in investment is not just a trend but a strategic move to future-proof CX strategies. Companies that have already embraced AI to increase CX automation recognize its transformative impact and are doubling down.
For businesses, now is the time to focus on specific use cases for AI. This is where Verint AI-powered bots shine, offering targeted solutions that enhance existing
workflows without necessitating a complete system overhaul.

Each AI-powered bot addresses a single challenge, such as customer self-service or automatic call summarization. There’s no need for a disruptive rip-and-replace approach. Instead, businesses can deploy each bot at their own pace, depending on their specific needs, to deliver AI business outcomes, now.

Telephony No Longer Reigns Supreme

The landscape of customer experience has shifted—61% of consumers prefer digital for asking a question. This trend underscores the need for businesses to adapt and invest in CX technology that helps serve customers how they want to be served.

Customers Want Resolutions, Fast

When it comes to CX, customers want speed more than anything else. While chatbots are fast, they don’t always resolve issues. The latest intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) use AI to understand customer intents and provide more effective resolutions.

AI Outcomes Are Critical

For customers, the priority is the tangible benefits AI brings to their experience, such as faster resolutions and more accurate assistance. It’s crucial for businesses to leverage AI to enhance the customer experience by focusing on delivering practical, outcome-oriented solutions that meet customer needs promptly and effectively.

Consumer Survey Methodology

Survey respondents were selected from online research panels, and data was collected via customized online survey between April 3, 2024, and May 2, 2024. A total of 1,500 surveys were completed by consumers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia (500 per country).

Brand Survey Methodology

Survey respondents were selected from an invitation-only business-to-business research panel in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Data was collected via a customized online survey
between April 12, 2024, and April 30, 2024.

A total of 450 surveys (150 per country) were completed by individuals who are directly involved in customer service or customer experience (CX) at organizations with at least 1,000 employees that interact with customers on at least one digital channel. The breakdown by role was: 11% C-level executive; 48% vice president, senior vice president, or executive vice president; 41% director or senior director.

The Verint State of Digital Customer Experience 2023 research was conducted with consumers and business leaders in the US only. When year-over-year comparisons are shown in the report, statistically significant differences among the US, UK, and Australia will be noted.