Introduction: Inside the changing world of CX teams

Innovative changes in online shopping, shipping, and social commerce have raised the bar for customer expectations. Today’s customers want instant access to information about their orders, 24/7 support, and consistently high-quality service at every touchpoint. This accessibility to brands has led to customer experience teams having to change the way they operate.

Agents are no longer just answering tickets, they’re updating website information, implementing the newest technologies, and rethinking strategies to keep up with rising demands.

The future of CX is headed towards being primarily self-serve, with space for agents to provide personalized support if and when necessary. This new approach means more time to build out a complete customer experience and more opportunities to drive revenue.

To help you stay ahead of the game this holiday season, we asked customer experience professionals, leaders, and agents about what their CX program looks like today and the tactics they’re implementing to ensure that they meet customer expectations.

Overwhelmed by tickets more than ever 

Over 65% of CX professionals report handling more tickets and requests in 2024 than in previous years. Nearly half confirm that their workload has increased due to factors such as demand for faster responses and seasonal spikes.

Teams are then facing a critical decision: increase headcount or stretch existing resources—including tools and agents—further. For nearly 1/3 of teams, they’ve opted to grow their staff size to maintain service quality. But bringing in new team members isn’t cheap—it requires significant investment in recruiting, onboarding, and continuous training. 

The alternative is doing more work with the same, or even fewer, resources. While this might save costs in the short term, it introduces the risk of burnt-out agents, a decrease in service quality, and, as a result, a loss in customer trust.

Benchmarking success

Nearly 71% of CX leaders track resolution time as their top indicator of success, and it’s easy to see why. One-touch resolutions, or tickets resolved in a single interaction, are the ideal scenario for customers. They dodge long wait times and back-and-forth interactions while agents gain back the time to manage more complex requests.

Similarly, 59% of CX teams prioritize first response time as a key success metric, reiterating the importance of how speed and resolution work together during busy periods.

Automating to speed up support

This year, 71% of CX leaders are relying on AI and automation to get ahead of the holiday rush. These tools can help to accelerate tasks like responding to customers and applying order updates so customers have minimal to no wait times. Plus, agents are able to skip over the repetitive work and take care of more complex support issues.

During high-traffic times like BFCM and the holidays, customers want answers fast. Waiting for answers can cause significant losses, like increased returns and missed sales opportunities. That’s why many CX teams are investing in AI to save on costs and provide faster-than-human solutions.

As CX teams rethink their strategies to adapt to evolving customer expectations, one thing remains the same: customers expect fast, accurate, and personalized support at every step of their journey. In the chapters ahead, we’ll explore these expectations and show you how to not only anticipate but meet customers’ needs for this holiday season.