51 Must-Know Customer Experience Stats in 2023

Customer experience is everything.

And when 50% of consumers will literally take their business elsewhere after just a single poor customer experience, it pays to get it right.

We’ve rounded up the latest customer experience stats, trends, and technologies to help you deliver the best possible customer experience out there.

Top-level customer experience trends

Customers are looking for more control over their support and contact options, and they want to be wowed more than ever with a truly delightful, empathetic experience.

• 93% of customers will spend more with a company that offers their preferred channel for customer service. (CX Trends 2022 Report, Zendesk, 2022)
• For 88% of customers, authenticity is an important factor when deciding which brands to support. 50% of customers say it’s very important to them. (Shifts in Consumer Shopping Habits: Authenticity, Personalization and the Power of UGC, Stackla, 2021)
• 92% of customers will spend more with a company when they don’t have to repeat information across channels and conversations. (CX Trends 2022 Report, Zendesk, 2022)
• 89% will spend more with companies that allow them to self-serve to find answers without contacting anyone. (CX Trends 2022 Report, Zendesk, 2022)
• 26% of consumers say a poor customer experience reduces their trust in a brand. (The State of Personal Commerce, Bluecore, 2021)
• 81% of customers say a positive CX experience increases the chance they’ll make another purchase with a brand. (CX Trends 2022 Report, Zendesk, 2022)
• 59% of consumers will walk away from a brand after repeated poor experiences, even if they previously loved it. For 17%, it takes just one bad experience to sour on a beloved brand. (Future of customer experience survey, PwC, 2018)
• 61% of consumers say they’ll switch to a competitor after only one bad service experience with your company. (CX Trends 2022 Report, Zendesk, 2022)
• 88% of customers say “the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services.” (State of the Connected Customer, Fifth Edition, Salesforce, 2022)
• 79% of customers ranked efficiency as their highest rated value when calling a business. (Clutch 2019 Telephone Customer Service Survey, Clutch, 2019)
• Only 35% of customers surveyed by Harvard Business Review agreed that companies understand them well. (“Empathy as a Cornerstone of Customer Experience,” Harvard Business Review, 2021)
• 60% of customers say they would buy more from a company if they were treated better along the way. (2022 Global Consumer Trends Report, Qualtrics, 2021)
• Companies could lose up to $4.7 trillion in global consumer spending due to poor customer service and experiences. (2022 Global Consumer Trends Report, Qualtrics, 2021)

Customer experience in the contact center

For most customers calling your contact center, voice and phone are still the prevalent channel. But they don’t want to be kept waiting to reach you on the phone, either—and some would still like other options, like texting and self-service chatbots.

• 68% of customers report their biggest problem with call centers was waiting on hold for too long and then getting disconnected. Another 59% of customers listed one of their major complaints as how long it takes to resolve their issue. (“Consumer Insights about Customer Service” survey, TCN, 2021)

Voice stats

• 59% of customers prefer the phone as a service channel, the number one channel among respondents to Salesforce’s survey. (State of the Connected Customer, Fifth Edition, Salesforce, 2022)
• Nearly 70% of customers are irritated when their call is transferred from one department to another. (Zendesk, 2020)
• 63% of customers prefer a callback to waiting on hold when they call a business. (Software Advice Survey, 2017)
• 63% of U.S. respondents to a Vonage survey said that IVR menu options are irrelevant to them. (2019 IVR survey, Vonage, 2019)
• 65% of survey respondents said that the reason they’re calling might not even be listed in the IVR, leading to more customer frustrations. (2019 IVR survey, Vonage, 2019)
• 46% of respondents in the U.S. and 37% of respondents in the U.K. say that IVR menus are too long, leading to a poor customer experience. (2019 IVR survey, Vonage, 2019)
• 51% of consumers have abandoned a business altogether because they’ve reached the IVR and grown frustrated. (2019 IVR survey, Vonage, 2019)
• Almost two-thirds of respondents to an Arise survey said that they’re only willing to wait on hold for two minutes before hanging up. (Phone Hold Times Survey, Arise, 2019)
• 57% of respondents to one survey ranked long hold times within their top-three issues when calling a business. (Clutch 2019 Telephone Customer Service Survey, Clutch, 2019)
• Customers ranked the most frustrating aspect of getting service help: 33% said waiting on hold, 33% said repeating themselves, 19% said slow response time, and 14% said not being able to resolve issues online. (Hubspot)

Chatbot interactions

• 54% of customers say their biggest chatbot frustration is the number of questions they have to answer before they’re finally transferred to a human who can help. (CX Trends 2022 Report, Zendesk, 2022)
• However, 69% of customers are now willing to interact with chatbots on straightforward issues—that’s a 23% increase over last year. (CX Trends 2022 Report, Zendesk, 2022)
• 42% of customers prefer online chatbots as a service channel. (State of the Connected Customer, Fifth Edition, Salesforce, 2022)
• 66% of respondents to a Microsoft survey say that when they reach out to customer service, they try to use self-service first, rather than directly reaching out to an agent. (State of global customer service report, Microsoft, 2018)

Text/SMS communication

• 19% of customers prefer texting as a customer service channel, compared to other options. (State of the Connected Customer, Fifth Edition, Salesforce, 2022)
• 69% of customers want the ability to text a business directly, and 54% are frustrated when they can’t. (Text Communication 2019 Report, EZ Texting, 2019)
• 60.8% of respondents to one U.S.-based survey would like the ability to text companies about customer support issues. (2020 SMS Marketing Report, SimpleTexting, 2020)
• 83% of consumers want to receive appointment reminders over text, and 66% of consumers want to receive service reminders over text. But only 20% of businesses send appointment reminders through this channel, and only 23% of businesses send service reminders through text. (Text Communication 2019 Report, EZ Texting, 2019)

Customer expectations and preferences

• 65% of customers expect customer service to be faster than it was five years ago (Analyst Report, Zendesk, 2020)
• 71% of customers say they expect a company to share info across channels, so they don’t have to repeat themselves. (CX Trends 2022 Report, Zendesk, 2022)
• 68% say they expect every interaction and experience to be personalized to them. (CX Trends 2022 Report, Zendesk, 2022)
• 62% of customers say they won’t remain loyal to a brand if they don’t receive a personalized experience. (The State of Personalization 2022, Twilio Segment, 2022)
• 73% of customers want the ability to start a conversation on one channel and pick it up seamlessly in a different channel, without any data or context getting lost. (CX Trends 2022 Report, Zendesk, 2022)
• 49% say they’ll likely become a repeat customer if they receive a personalized shopping experience with a retail brand. (The State of Personalization 2022, Twilio Segment, 2022)
• Brands with a unified omnichannel strategy were three times more likely to report revenue growth over the past year and four times more likely to report customer loyalty. (The State of Customer Experience Benchmark Report, Mitto, 2021)
• 30% of customers expect call center agents to be familiar with their history as soon as the conversation starts, so they don’t have to repeat themselves. (The Customer Experience Tipping Point, Ipsos + Medallia, 2018)
• Omnichannel consumers make purchases 70% more often and spend about 34% more money than shoppers in physical stores. (McKinsey Omnichannel Apparel Survey 2018, McKinsey, 2022)
• 71% of consumers expect a personalized experience from brands. (Next in Personalization Report, McKinsey, 2021)
• 57% of customers prefer to engage with brands through digital channels first. (State of the Connected Customer, Fifth Edition, Salesforce, 2022)
• 78% of customers have used multiple channels to carry through an entire transaction. (State of the Connected Customer, Fifth Edition, Salesforce, 2022)
• Omnichannel strategies “drive an 80% higher rate of incremental store visits,” according to Google. (Google Internal Data, 2017)

Agent experience

What’s going on inside your contact center will certainly influence the experience your customers receive when they interact with your agents. Many agents right now are dealing with overwhelming ticket volumes and stressful workloads, which can lead to attrition, increased hold times, and lower service quality.

• Only 20% of contact center agents are satisfied with the quality of their training. (CX Trends 2022 Report, Zendesk, 2022)
• Just 15% of agents are happy with their overall workload. (CX Trends 2022 Report, Zendesk, 2022)
• On average, ticket baselines are 20% higher than they were before the pandemic started. (Benchmark Snapshot: Impacts of COVID-19 on CX, Zendesk, 2021)
• 87% of call center workers surveyed in one study reported high or very high stress levels at work. 77% reported high or very high personal stress levels. (Making Call Center Jobs Better, Cornell University and McMaster University, 2020)
• Contact centers saw attrition rates of 42% in 2021. Larger contact centers even saw rates as high as 50%. (2022 NICE WEM Global Survey, NICE, 2022)
• 96% of call center agents reported feeling acutely stressed at least once per week in 2021. (State of the Contact Center 2021, Calabrio, 2021)

Next steps

Understanding customer preferences and trends in channels is one step forward. To truly elevate your contact center’s own CX, you need a solution that allows you to act on those learnings and create a seamless, omnichannel experience with the customer at the forefront.

Mindful delivers best-in-class solutions for virtual queuing, callback scheduling, and omnichannel transitioning for an ideal customer experience. No matter how your customers start their journey with you, Mindful will help you capture all the context needed to continue the conversation across any channel and quickly reach a resolution—reducing headaches for both your customers and your agents. Schedule a demo to see for yourself.