Every industry has specific moments where customers expect exceptional customer service, and these interactions can be make-or-break for the business. For healthcare providers, it’s billing. In insurance, it’s the claims process. Retailers succeed or fail with their returns policies. 

Drop the ball in these moments and you instantly lose credibility, trust and loyalty. Customers will turn their backs on your brand and seek out a competitor that honors their increasingly lofty expectations. 

In today’s experience-driven world, artificial intelligence (AI) enables companies to deliver efficient, personalized and empathetic experiences at scale. That can provide a critical edge in competitive markets. 

Yet, Genesys research shows a massive disconnect between customers’ expectations and what companies are delivering. As an example, a vast majority of consumers surveyed (86%) said they expect to connect with a service agent via phone or chat within 1-10 minutes, and only 4% think longer than that is acceptable. 

The research also reveals why that gap is so dangerous to businesses: 

  • Eighty-two percent of consumers surveyed say that a “company is only as good as its service.” 
  • A majority (55%) would pay more for quality support. 
  • More than half (53%) would switch from a favorite brand after two to five poor service interactions 
  • Almost a third of consumers have warned others against a company after just one negative customer experience. 

Superior customer service is no longer about resolving the root cause of a customer’s problem. That interaction must be fast and frictionless, anticipatory and even empathetic. 

And thanks to ubiquitous digital technology, customers now compare an experience with a business against the best experiences they’ve had anywhere, regardless of industry. Businesses are expected to instantly make sense of a problem and seamlessly execute a resolution. Don’t waste the customer’s time, and don’t fuel their frustration. 

That’s the reality of today’s experience economy. The experience you deliver is as important as the product you sell. 

The New Metrics of the Experience Economy 

A big reason behind the customer experience disconnect is that loyalty is measured differently. Traditional customer service metrics, such as average handling time and first-contact resolution, target internal efficiencies and cost structures. But in the experience economy what’s paramount are efficiencies around the customer’s perspective. Criteria driving this include customer retention and revenue per customer, as well as CAST and NPS. 

Companies shouldn’t abandon efforts to improve efficiencies; they must broaden their view to understand and embrace the power of loyalty.   

Businesses must redefine how they understand and target efficiencies from a customer’s perspective, and rethink their processes and interactions around that. How much does cost per resolution matter when some customers wait on hold for an hour? How supported does a customer feel when she doesn’t have to retell her situation across multiple interactions? 

Resolutions that can solve challenges on customers’ behalf, in ways that meet them where they are, deliver better outcomes for customers, and strengthen their trust and loyalty. 

Even tiny lifts in loyalty can have an enormous impact.  

What we’ve seen from our customers is that the impact of increasing loyalty by even a small amount can equal or even surpass the impact of large increases in efficiency.  

Customer loyalty is a potential force-multiplying lever, whether it’s articulated as brand value, up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, or avoided lost profit when customers jump ship. 

An AI-Focused Infrastructure Drives Outcomes 

In those make-or-break customer interactions, critical information is shared that can help a business understand what customer-centric outcomes it needs to drive. Successful companies in the experience economy home in on those outcomes and then implement processes and technologies to support them. 

Don’t underestimate the organizational change management this requires. It affects everything from sales and marketing to fulfillment and logistics and even HR, involving data flows and integrations and employee support systems. It’s about combining and contextualizing data, in real time, to provide agents with the full context of everything learned during a customer’s journey, across assisted and automated conversations. 

And automation across voice and digital channels isn’t enough. Businesses need to tailor channels to specific customer needs, enable seamless transition between channels, and provide both human and virtual agents with tools and information to deliver exceptional customer experiences.  

The engine of the experience economy is AI: Virtual agents, generative AI and agentic AI that enable companies to deliver effective, efficient and even emotionally intelligent customer experiences. Generative AI enables bot flows and copilots based on intent, analyzing interactions across channels, crafting messages, and summarizing conversations and surfacing recommendations in real time. Agentic AI extends this to autonomy with predictive capabilities to understand goals, decide next-best steps and execute actions across front- and back-office systems. 

None of this works with a group of stitched-together point solutions. It requires a unified AI platform built for customer experience. Here’s what that looks like in two industries:   

  • An insurance company wants to increase self-service for claims processing. In addition to automation, AI proactively recognizes and intervenes if a customer struggles with that self-service option. It also gauges when to reroute to involve an agent that has availability and knowledge to help the customer quickly and efficiently. 
  • A retailer’s systems identify a customer delivery delay and automatically execute several actions before the customer even knows about it: route the issue to a backend system, trigger a refund policy and flag the anomaly for human review. 

Reinforcing Loyalty and Trust — One Experience at a Time 

Organizations that learn to coordinate seamless, efficient and memorable experiences will reinforce customer’s trust and loyalty. Upon those pillars, businesses can build revenue and strengthen brands and thrive. 

The experience economy is just one trend CX leaders need to prepare for this year. Watch our on-demand webinar to get the full story on all five CX trends for 2026.