2024 Gladly CX Pulse Report

As pioneers in the customer experience (CX) space, we understand the hunger industry leaders have for insights into the success, evaluation, and evolution of the CX industry as a whole. Our discussions with industry leaders revealed their main focuses for the year — over 37% are already prioritizing ease of use, AI capabilities, and sophisticated reporting in their CX strategies.

To help CX leaders leverage these insights effectively and navigate the evolving landscape, we’re committed to sharing actionable data and best practices gleaned from our customers — some of the world’s most-loved brands.

Our mission is to provide a benchmark for CX leaders to better understand emerging trends and the perspectives of their peers.

To achieve this, we engaged with over 7,000 members of our Gladly Connect community to capture insights related to their customer experience priorities, the success metrics that they were most interested in, and which technologies they were looking at to unlock customer loyalty.

We also captured performance data from over 300 Gladly users to understand how leading brands interact with customers. These data points were then anonymized to establish benchmarks for other CX leaders interested in building a modern customer support team.

If evaluating which communication channels were most important to your customers wasn’t enough, AI and automation added as many new and unique opportunities as operational complexities. Understanding the importance of AI and knowing how to use it are two different things. The ever-growing library of AI tools and automation use cases make integration a challenge. It turns out, you’re not alone — more than 40% of CX leaders are still deciding how to incorporate AI into their support strategy.

Below are key insights from some of the world’s most loved brands, as well as top recommendations for channel optimization and AI integration.

In the dynamic customer service landscape, the objective is clear: resolve customer issues swiftly and effectively. So it’s no wonder why brands increasingly favor chat as their go-to channel — our data shows that 73% of agent chats end with a first contact resolution.

However, our data highlights one key area to optimize on: the average handle time (AHT) for chat interactions is 2x that of channels such as phone, email, and SMS. This underscores the necessity for innovative strategies that maintain service quality while boosting operational efficiency.

So, how can customer service teams, especially those managing multiple chats at once, strike the right balance between speed and effectiveness?

One effective strategy is adopting advanced chat management tools that empower agents to handle numerous conversations simultaneously while maintaining a personal touch. With AI-powered solutions, teams can streamline workflows, prioritize queries, and offer real-time assistance. These tools suggest relevant responses, provide access to a knowledge base, and anticipate customer needs, lightening the workload for agents.

A major factor contributing to high average handle times is the challenge of efficiently connecting customers with agents who can effectively address their questions.

Technology like People Match® tackles this issue by intelligently routing shoppers to the right agent based on their expertise and the customer’s needs while prioritizing the most important customers. This feature reduces shopper frustration and ensures that loyal customers or those on specific journeys can speak with the right people faster. As a result, Gladly customers see improvements in average handle time and customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), while also achieving new KPIs related to revenue generation and overall net promoter score (NPS).

Suggested Resource: Combine the power of agents and AI chatbots to create a more robust and cohesive customer experience, as exemplified by Breeze Airways.

Our customers are no strangers when it comes to driving company growth through CX — despite dealing with 18x the contact volume, Gladly customers with more than 100 employees are within 3% of the first contact resolution average of businesses half their size.

However, as brands expand, they often encounter a massive surge in call volume — sometimes doubling or even tripling overnight. Without a scalable solution, your support teams will struggle to keep up, leading to frustrated customers and lost opportunities.

Automating phone support to handle routine inquiries is an easy way to improve efficiency. Tools like IVR can handle routine calls quickly, boosting your team’s performance metrics. Skills-based routing systems ensure customers are connected with the right agent the first time — rather than wasting their time bouncing around from one rep to another.

Like IVR and skills-based routing, generative AI has become a powerful tool that can scale phone support alongside your business. In fact, AI can help agent-driven voice interactions by granting agents access to core customer information, past conversations, potential product recommendations, and standardized answers to frequently asked questions.

These tools give your agents more time and energy to resolve complex issues on the first contact and eliminate inefficiencies preventing brands from scaling their CX departments. Larger brands can use these tools to maintain small-business effectiveness, even with a high volume of requests.

Suggested Resource: Perfect your IVR experience with IVR scripts designed to fit some of the most common support interactions your team may encounter.

Email is one of the most commonly used channels in customer service. However, communicating with customers through email often extends the length of each interaction, increasing the overall average interaction time and burning through agent hours – 34% of email volume takes 10+ hours and multiple email responses to resolve. That being said, 62% of customer support teams prioritize email above all other channels and still consider it the most important channel in their strategy.

In short, email remains a valuable channel for customer outreach, but with numerous alternatives available, optimizing it can boost your brand’s overall effectiveness. One new method used by many CX leaders is AI automation.

Take one of our customers, a thriving beauty brand. By leveraging our collaborative and conversational AI, Gladly Sidekick, this customer was able to resolve 60% of email conversations. As a result, Sidekick helped them reduce BPO costs, enhance SLAs, and increase customer loyalty.

Suggested Resources:

• Learn how to reduce cart abandonment rates by enhancing customer service
• Boost productivity and reduce customer service costs with AI solutions designed to streamline your workflow and free up agents.

CX leaders increasingly recognize that customer service excellence cannot be achieved in isolation — 57% of CX leaders report that their teams need more support from other business areas. This shortfall highlights a critical organizational challenge: the need for seamless integration and cooperation among departments to enhance customer experience outcomes.

Establishing cross-functional teams grants your customer service department access to the information they need to drive loyalty, improve CX performance, and modernize how your brand interacts with customers. It’s essential to communicate to teams that CX plays an enormous role in how businesses survive and thrive in the loyalty economy. An investment in CX initiatives affects almost every department in any company — from IT and Operations to Finance and the C-Suite. When teams work together to enhance CX, customer service can be a revenue generator.

Suggested Resources:

• For actionable tips on how to achieve this level of buy-in, check out A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Buy-In and Driving Change for CX Leaders
• Learn more on how to boost collaboration between customer service and digital teams

Customer behavior is undergoing a significant transformation, marked by a notable preference for self-service solutions and automation. In today’s digital age, customers expect immediate, convenient issue resolution. Among Gladly customers, 55% now prioritize self-service and automated options to tackle their concerns.

With this shift, Gladly customers are more flexible in the way they interact with shoppers. This same flexibility extends to their support centers, where agents are freed up to handle more complex customer issues with more efficiency to improve first contact resolution, customer satisfaction, and agent motivation.

Take Lauren Inman-Semerau, Head of Customer Experience at Rothy’s. She uses our AI-driven self-service solution, Sidekick, to not only reduce labor costs by taking over tedious, mundane tasks, but also to generate more revenue by creating free time to nurture and train her agents to become brand ambassadors, bring the in-store experience to life, and grow additional skills, including upselling.

“All of that low-hanging fruit, get it done — get it out to the queue. AI can do that while I’m working to upscale the rest of the agents so they can have deep knowledge of the product, start to sell, and surprise and delight…I want [my brand ambassadors] to be revenue generators and product experts.”

Suggested Resources:

• Explore how brands like Rothy’s, BSN Sports, and Breeze Airways are leveraging AI & automation for CX success.
• Analyze metrics like contacts per order to get a clear picture of how your customer experience is shaping and adapting to customer behavior.

In a fiercely competitive market where products and services often blur into a sea of similarity, loyalty programs have emerged as powerful differentiators for brands. Understanding these programs’ pivotal role is crucial for CX leaders aiming to foster lasting customer relationships and stand out from the crowd.

With 71% of CX leaders confident that their brand’s loyalty program is above average, it’s clear that many recognize the strategic value of these initiatives.

Creating a loyalty program isn’t as easy as just giving away free products or coupons at set intervals. An effective program will encourage customers to stick with your brand and share it with their friends. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the way your loyalty program motivates customers should align with your specific goals.

If you’re looking to increase customer acquisition and awareness, provide loyalty incentives for referrals or run social media campaigns that require tagging other followers. You can also share incentives to increase repeat buyers by offering them automatic free items on their second purchase or cashback and coupon emails sent after checkout.

Our data shows that SMS continues to be a less frequently used channel, with less than 12% of contact volume flowing through the channel.

Yet, SMS shows considerable promise, with approximately 50% of SMS contacts resulting in first-contact resolution. This suggests that SMS could be more effective for specific use cases, such as rewards programs and delivery updates, where quick and concise communication is essential.

These trends and insights will provide you with an understanding of what’s going on in the industry today — but CX is always evolving. As customer needs change and new solutions emerge, it’s crucial that industry leaders stay informed to remain ahead.

To learn more about the present and future trends of the CX industry straight from the experts who are putting them into practice, check out the Gladly Connect community or watch live sessions from Gladly Connect Live. From in-person events and on-demand webinars to online learning and mentorship, Gladly Connect is committed to being an open resource to CX leaders who want to learn, grow, and evolve alongside the industry.

Interested in learning more about Gladly’s AI and automation solutions, like Hero and Sidekick? Schedule a no-strings-attached demo with a member of our Sales team today.