For years, customer experience leaders have been chasing speed. Faster websites, faster apps, faster response times and faster resolution.
The assumption has been simple: if we can make experiences faster, customers will be happier. But customers are sending a different message. They don’t just want speed, they want confidence and they want clarity. And most importantly, they want to feel understood.
Recent consumer research from Glance revealed a surprising shift in customer expectations. While businesses continue investing heavily in AI and automation, consumers are becoming less impressed by speed alone. The percentage of consumers who said “feeling understood” matters most during a support interaction increased significantly over the last six months, while the importance of speed actually declined. At the same time, nearly eight in ten consumers reported experiencing interactions that were fast but still frustrating.
That’s an important distinction.
Customers aren’t rewarding companies for moving quickly if the experience still requires extra effort. In fact, many organizations have accidentally optimized for efficiency at the expense of understanding.
The Customer Experience Speed Trap
One of the most common frustrations in customer service has nothing to do with wait times. It’s having to explain the same problem over and over again. Customers encounter an issue. They try self-service, a chatbot, call support, switch channels and they repeat themselves. Every handoff creates friction.
Every repetition increases frustration.
Our research found that more than 40% of consumers say they almost always have to repeat themselves when moving between channels. Think about that for a moment. Organizations have spent millions improving digital experiences, yet one of the biggest sources of customer frustration remains largely unchanged. The problem isn’t necessarily that companies aren’t moving fast enough. The problem is that customers are doing too much work.
Why “Show Me” Beats “Tell Me” For Faster Customer Service
When customers contact support, they’re often asked to describe what they’re seeing. That sounds reasonable in theory. In practice, it rarely works well. Imagine trying to explain a confusing online banking screen, a billing issue, an insurance application, or a complex checkout process. Customers describe one thing. Representatives interpret another. The conversation becomes longer and more frustrating than it needs to be.
This challenge recently surfaced at Baxter Credit Union (BCU), which serves more than 370,000 members. Like many organizations, BCU recognized that customers were struggling to communicate digital issues through words alone. Rather than asking members to repeatedly explain what they were seeing, the credit union enabled members to securely show representatives their experience in real time.
The result wasn’t simply faster support; it was clearer support. And clarity matters. When customers can show instead of tell, misunderstandings disappear. Resolution becomes easier. Effort decreases. Confidence increases. Those outcomes are difficult to achieve through automation alone.
When CX Speed Meets AI: A Reality Check
None of this means AI isn’t valuable. In fact, consumers continue to embrace self- service for many routine interactions. But the data suggests something important is happening: customers are becoming more selective about where automation belongs.
Our latest survey found that 76.7% of consumers still prefer human support over AI-first experiences. More notably, the percentage of consumers who believe AI makes support harder increased by eight percentage points compared to six months earlier.
This doesn’t signal a rejection of AI. It signals a rejection of poor experiences. Customers appreciate automation when it removes effort. They dislike automation when it creates obstacles. Too often, organizations deploy technology with the goal of reducing service costs. Customers simply evaluate technology on whether it makes it easier for them to achieve their goal. Those are not always the same thing.
A Better CX Metric
Customer experience speed is easy to measure. Understanding is harder. But it’s what customers actually remember.
Perhaps customer experience leaders should be asking a different question. Instead of measuring how quickly customers move through an interaction, what if we measured how quickly they felt understood? That may sound subtle, but it’s a fundamentally different objective. One focuses on operational efficiency. The other focuses on customer confidence.
The companies creating the best experiences increasingly recognize that customers don’t remember average handle time, response speed, or workflow optimization. They remember whether solving their problem felt easy. They remember whether someone understood what they needed. And they remember whether they left the interaction feeling more confident than when they started.
Speed still matters. But understanding matters more. As AI continues to reshape customer experiences, the organizations that win won’t be those that eliminate human interaction entirely. They’ll be the ones that use technology to make human interactions more effective, more seamless, and more valuable. Because in customer experience, the goal isn’t simply to move faster. It’s to help customers move forward.
Customer experience speed will always matter. It just can’t be the only thing you measure
Tom Martin is a CX and contact center strategist, product lifecycle expert, and partnership builder. Tom has led Glance through a successful “pivot,” transitioning from a small business screen share tool to a provider of omnichannel visual engagement solutions for some of the
largest enterprises in the world. Since that pivot, Glance has experienced multiple years of 70% YoY growth. Prior to joining Glance in 2013, Tom spent over a decade at Verizon building and managing strategic partnerships. Outside of the office, Tom is an avid backcountry skier, mountaineer, and competitive cyclist.
