Genesys®, a global cloud leader in AI-Powered Experience Orchestration, released the fifth edition of its “State of Customer Experience” report, revealing that customer experience (CX) has become an increasingly decisive factor in consumer loyalty and spending decisions. More than half of consumers say they would rather do anything else than contact customer service, and 85% say poor service has caused them to spend less or stop doing business with a brand altogether.
As customer expectations rise and patience for poor experiences declines, organisations face growing pressure to use AI to strengthen customer relationships, not solely to reduce costs. While 76% of consumers expect AI to improve the quality and speed of customer service and 75% believe it will improve personalisation, the research shows they have little patience for experiences that increase effort or fail to resolve issues.
Consumers increasingly care more about outcomes than whether AI or a person provides the service. While 76% don’t care who resolves their issue as long as it’s solved quickly and completely, they still expect experiences to be both efficient and empathetic. In fact, 94% value efficiency as much as empathy, and the inability to reach a human agent remains their top frustration, reinforcing the need to orchestrate AI and human agents to deliver the right support at the right moment.
Meeting those expectations remains a challenge for many organisations. While 95% of consumers expect information to be remembered across channels, nearly half (48%) of organisations do not automatically pass information between virtual and human agents. At the same time, maintaining service quality with aging infrastructure has become the top operational challenge for CX leaders, hindering efforts to connect customer data, channels and interactions, leading to customer frustration and eroded loyalty.
Key findings from India:
- Speed is the new measure of good customer service: 39% of Indian consumers surveyed expect to wait no more than 2–5 minutes for support. Yet 67% report having waited in a queue or on hold for longer than that, highlighting a significant gap between expectations and reality. At the same time, 86% say they don’t mind whether their issue is resolved by a human or AI as long as it’s resolved quickly and completely, compared to 76% globally. The findings underscore that for Indian consumers, fast, effective resolution matters more than who delivers it.
- The quiet cost of poor service: 38% consumers in India stopped buying from companies or stopped using their service altogether after receiving poor customer service from that company. While more than half (53%) continued buying they spent less than they normally would, compared to 43% globally. This showcases the business cost of poor service delivery, even when customers don’t walk away entirely.
- Indian consumers’ growing confidence in AI: Majority (94%) of Indian consumers believe AI will improve the quality and speed of customer service over the next two-three years, and 92% believe it will improve personalisation –well ahead of the global figures of 76% and 75% respectively. This signals a market primed to embrace AI-led experiences, provided the outcomes keep pace with expectations.
- Indian organisations are investing to close the gap: In response to rising expectations, 52% of Indian CX leaders are modernising their CX technology stack for cloud, AI, and future innovation – the top strategic priority in India, well above the global average of 32%. Indian leaders are also investing more broadly to act on this as 64% are investing in AI-powered tools and platforms and 64% are implementing an integrated CX platform.
“India is emerging as one of the world’s most AI-ready customer experience markets. It combines exceptionally high consumer confidence in AI, strong enterprise investment in cloud and AI modernisation, and a growing ability to deliver connected, personalised experiences at scale. This positions India to become a leader in the next phase of AI-powered experience orchestration. As Agentic AI becomes more deeply embedded in customer engagement, the organisations that successfully orchestrate experiences by leveraging AI, human expertise and customer context will be best positioned to strengthen customer loyalty and drive long-term growth,” said Mr. Raja Lakshmipathy, Vice President & Managing Director, India & SAARC, Genesys.
Key findings from the global report include:
- Customer expectations have never been higher. Ninety-two percent of consumers expect every organisation to deliver experiences on par with the best experience they have ever had. Ninety-one percent say a company is only as good as its customer service, a nine-percentage-point increase from the previous year.
- Consumers are embracing AI — but expect it to deliver. Nearly half (46%) are comfortable with AI making decisions on their behalf if it improves speed and resolution. But patience is limited when AI falls short: 84% will give a virtual agent three attempts or fewer to resolve an issue.
- Poor experiences have real business consequences. Sixty-six percent of consumers would switch to a competitor after three or fewer bad experiences with a brand. For 21% of consumers, it only takes one bad experience before they switch, a 24% increase from the prior year.
- Organisations see agentic AI and orchestration as key to closing the experience gap. Eighty-two percent of CX leaders expect autonomous AI agents to orchestrate customer experiences within three years and 40% of organisations are already using agentic AI.
The findings suggest the future of customer experience depends not only on agentic AI adoption, but on how effectively organisations connect AI, human interactions, data and systems across the customer journey.
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