Insights from Verint’s 2026 State of CX Report
There’s a subtle but important shift hiding inside Verint’s newly released State of Customer Experience 2026 report, and I suspect a lot of people are going to misread it.
The easy headline – the one that will travel fastest across LinkedIn – is that customers increasingly prefer humans over AI. On the surface, the data supports that interpretation. Verint found that 61% of customers now prefer speaking with a human agent, up 5% year over year. Even more surprising, the sharpest increase came from younger consumers between 18 and 34 years old.
That sounds almost counterintuitive. We’ve spent years assuming digitally native consumers would naturally gravitate toward automated experiences while older consumers clung to phone support and human interaction. But I don’t think this report is actually telling us that people suddenly want “more human service.” I think it’s telling us something much more uncomfortable for the CX industry: customers have become deeply intolerant of bad automation.
That’s a very different conclusion.
In fact, the report practically says this outright – although somewhat quietly. Among customers who currently prefer speaking to a human, 69% said they would willingly switch to automated service if the AI could fully resolve their issue. Among younger consumers, that number rises to 93%.
That changes the entire framing.
Customers are not rejecting AI. They’re rejecting unresolved interactions masquerading as modernization. Over the last several years, many companies rushed toward automation because the economics were irresistible. Deflect calls. Reduce labor costs. Lower ticket volume. Improve containment rates. Those goals became so dominant that somewhere along the way, a large portion of the industry quietly stopped optimizing for customer resolution and started optimizing for operational efficiency.
Consumers noticed.
You can feel it in everyday interactions now. The chatbot that confidently misunderstands the question. The endless escalation loop. The forced self-service flow designed less to help than to absorb time. The maddening repetition when a customer finally reaches a human being who has no context from the prior interaction. Customers don’t experience these systems as intelligent. They experience them as avoidance infrastructure.
That’s why I think the rise in preference for human agents is being misunderstood. Customers are not necessarily asking for warmth, empathy, or old-fashioned service nostalgia. They are asking for competence. Humans remain the escalation path customers trust most because humans, despite their flaws, still possess something many automated systems do not: adaptive judgment.
That distinction matters because it fundamentally changes the strategic challenge ahead.
The question is no longer how much automation a company can insert into the service experience before customers revolt. The question is whether the system can actually complete the job from beginning to end. Verint repeatedly returns to this idea throughout the report using phrases like “end-to-end resolution” and “agentic self-service.” That language is important because it signals where the market is heading next.
The first era of AI in customer experience was largely about access. Could companies deploy AI? Could they automate conversations? Could they build self-service experiences quickly enough to demonstrate movement to the market?
The next era will be about orchestration quality. Can the system actually resolve the issue without creating new friction? Can it maintain context? Can it determine when a human should intervene? Can it move fluidly between channels, systems, and workflows without collapsing into fragmentation?
That’s a much harder problem than building a chatbot.
One of the more revealing moments in the report comes in the ranking of what customers actually value in a good experience. Speed ranks first. Prompt information from agents ranks first specifically. The ability to resolve issues without speaking to a human ranks second. Easily reaching a human when needed ranks third. Empathy comes fifth.
That should probably make parts of the CX industry uncomfortable.
For years, customer experience conversations have centered heavily around emotional engagement, delight, personalization, and relationship-building. Those things certainly matter, but this data reinforces something many consumers have been signaling for quite a while now: most people primarily want friction removed from their lives. Quickly. Quietly. Reliably.
The irony is that the industry often interprets this desire for reduced friction as a demand for more automation, when in reality customers are demanding better systems. Those are not the same thing.
The report’s findings around channels reinforce this point. After years of dramatic migration toward digital engagement, preferences appear to be stabilizing around a roughly 70/30 split between digital and phone. That’s meaningful because it suggests consumers are becoming increasingly channel-agnostic. They care far less about where the interaction happens than whether it moves efficiently toward resolution.
That may sound obvious, but it carries major implications for how companies structure CX investments. For a long time, organizations treated channels themselves as strategic differentiators. Mobile strategy. Messaging strategy. Social strategy. Voice strategy. But the real competitive advantage increasingly appears to live elsewhere – inside continuity.
Can the experience maintain momentum as customers move between systems? Can context travel with the interaction? Can escalation happen intelligently without forcing the customer to restart the process from scratch?
Those operational questions are rapidly becoming the real customer experience.
In that sense, this report may actually describe the gradual collapse of the distinction between CX and operations. What customers perceive as a “great experience” increasingly reflects the underlying coherence of the organization itself. Fragmented systems create fragmented experiences. Poor internal orchestration eventually becomes externally visible.
AI is accelerating that exposure because it is simultaneously raising expectations everywhere. Once consumers become accustomed to instantaneous, context-aware systems in one part of their lives, they begin recalibrating what they view as acceptable friction everywhere else. The report shows this clearly in the widening expectation gap. In 2024, only 19% of customers reported increased service expectations. By 2026, that number jumped to 42%.
That’s not a temporary spike. It’s a structural shift.
And it helps explain another dramatic finding: 79% of consumers say they would switch brands after a single terrible customer experience. Survey numbers like that should always be interpreted cautiously because stated behavior and real-world behavior rarely align perfectly. Still, the directional signal matters. Tolerance is shrinking. Customers increasingly interpret friction not as unfortunate, but as evidence that the company simply does not have its act together.
That may be the biggest takeaway from this entire report.
The industry spent years talking about digital transformation as though implementing technology itself was the transformation. What this data suggests instead is that customers are now evaluating companies based on whether those technologies actually produce coherent outcomes.
The era of performative automation is ending. What comes next will be defined less by how much AI a company deploys and more by whether the experience actually works.
Photo by Jochen van Wylick on Unsplash
