Enterprises are investing millions into customer experience platforms that promise real-time insight and personalization. But the procurement teams buying those systems are often operating without visibility themselves.
Only 48 percent of procurement and legal professionals at mid-market and enterprise organizations report having clear, centralized access to contracts, according to a survey by Vallor, an AI-agent procurement platform. The rest piece together contracts from shared drives, email threads, and scattered tools, which buries obligations and deadlines where no one can see them until it’s too late.
Manual processes and fragmented storage of procurement agreements are slowing down tech onboarding and affecting ROI.
Around 59 percent of professionals still manage contract review and redlining by hand, 46 percent track renewals manually, and 44 percent generate reports without using any form of automation, the survey found.
It’s a striking irony that the same organizations racing to modernize customer experience with AI-driven insights and instant personalization are often running their own procurement operations on spreadsheets and email chains.
As Antonio Goncalves, Vallor’s CEO, told CX Today:
“Companies spend millions on CX tools but once contracts are signed, business and CX teams can't quickly find what's in them to actually service customers.”
This disconnect undermines the agility that leaders are aiming to achieve, because when procurement teams can’t see terms, deadlines or value commitments, the entire customer experience chain slows down.
The Hidden Cost of CX Procurement Inefficiencies
Poor visibility into investments in CX technology has a tangible impact on enterprise operations. More than half of the respondents to Vallor’s survey said it takes between 30 minutes and 2 hours to locate and validate a single contract clause, delaying execution and supplier onboarding.
In turn, delays in onboarding with vendors because of inefficient processes in dealing with contracts result in delayed time to value. And by missing SLAs or renewal terms, enterprises risk disruptions that affect customers as well as wasted spend.
Reflecting the financial toll, nearly 1 in 3 respondents to Vallor’s survey said their companies had missed rebates, discounts, or obligations because their agreements were inaccessible or poorly tracked. This can compound into millions of dollars in unclaimed value.
And with regulatory requirements on the rise—a record number of pages were published in the US Federal Register last year—buried obligations such as data privacy to environmental clauses can become ticking time bombs.