More than half of customers now say businesses fail them when they need help. At the same time, 42% report their expectations have risen in 2026, compared to 36% in 2025.
Two numbers moving in opposite directions, and the distance between them is getting larger.
These are two of the headline statistics from Verint's State of Customer Experience 2026 report.
According to Kelly Koelliker, VP of Product Marketing at Verint, the reason behind these worrying findings is that budget pressure has forced contact centers to do more with less, while the rush to plug that gap with AI self-service has, in many cases, backfired.
Koelliker explain:
“A lot of the contact centers we talk to are saying: I need more people, but they won't let me hire more people.”
“So when that happens, your customer experience is going to suffer. A lot of organizations have tried to put some AI on their website to avoid answering questions, but they're not putting the right thought and process into how they're doing it. It's causing a lot of bad CX.”
The Boiling Point
Nowhere is that frustration more visible than in the report's human preference data.
61% of customers now prefer speaking to a human agent over an AI-powered service – up five percent year-on-year.
More striking is the 18% rise in human agent preference among 18–34-year-olds: the demographic most brands have counted on as their natural self-service audience.
Koelliker, however, is not surprised. To illustrate the point, she details a real-life example from her local Facebook community group, where a customer returned a perfectly functional product, not because of any fault with the item, but because they refused to deal with the company's customer service experience.
“People are tired of just yelling 'representative' into the phone,” she says. “It has reached a boiling point.
“People have hated bad self-service for a long time, but now they're willing to take their business elsewhere. That's how bad it's gotten.”
But this isn’t a ‘human = good, AI = bad’ story. Indeed, 69% of customers who currently prefer human agents say they would switch to AI if it could fully resolve their issue.
They are not opposed to automation; they are opposed to automation that fails them.
Koelliker says:
“Buyers feel offended. You can't just look at efficiency and say we win. You have to say: ‘My customer should leave this interaction thrilled.’ Otherwise, it's not worth it.”
Getting AI Self-Service Right
Koelliker describes what good AI self-service requires as a “four prong” framework: