If you asked a customer today whether they expect to move seamlessly between chat, phone, email, and self-service without repeating themselves, the answer would be an obvious yes. If you asked a CX leader whether their organization actually delivers that experience, the honest answer, according to new data from the 2026 CX Leaders Trends & Insights: Corporate Edition report, is usually “somewhat,” and often “no.”
Multichannel customer journeys have become the default, not the exception. But the operational maturity to support them consistently hasn’t caught up. That gap is one of the clearest tensions in this year’s research, with real implications for how CX leaders prioritize investment..
The Data: Multichannel Adoption Has Become Universal
Customers aren’t sticking to one channel to resolve an issue; they’re moving across several, often within a single interaction. In recent consumer surveys, 82% of consumers indicated they’d had at least one instance of resolving a single customer care issue across multiple channels, up from 78% in 2024.
That’s no longer niche. It’s the norm. And it’s only trending upward.
On the corporate side, the picture confirms just how central multichannel resolution has become to daily operations. In 2025, organizations reported that a meaningful share of customer issues are now resolved across 61–100% of channels touched, a notable shift from the smaller, more contained channel mixes of prior years.
The Gap: Few Organizations Are Delivering It Well
Here’s where the disconnect shows up. When CX leaders were asked directly whether their organization does a good job of providing a seamless, consistent, and easy experience as customers transition between channels and solutions, the results were sobering:
- Only 11% of respondents said “Yes” — their organization delivers a seamless, consistent experience across channels.
- 63% said “Somewhat” — a majority, but a qualified one.
- The remaining respondents said “No.”
That 11% figure has fallen in recent years and appears to have only just stabilized year over year. In other words, this isn’t a new problem CX leaders haven’t gotten to yet; it’s a persistent one that hasn’t meaningfully improved even as multichannel volume has grown.
Redundancy is Still the Norm, Not the Exception
Part of what makes a channel transition feel broken to customers is having to repeat themselves, explaining the same issue to a chatbot, then again to an agent, then again if they’re transferred. The report’s data shows this is still common practice at most organizations:
- Fewer than half (38%) of organizations have a process in place to help customers avoid repeating information as they transition across channels and from unassisted solutions.
That means, for most organizations, a customer moving from self-service to a live agent, or between channels, is more likely than not to have to start over. This single friction point is one of the most cited, longest-standing customer complaints in CX research, and the data suggests it remains largely unresolved.
Why the Gap Exists: Measurement Hasn’t Caught Up
Part of the reason consistency lags is that measurement itself is uneven across channels. Assisted channels (like phone and live chat) are monitored far more rigorously than unassisted solutions and multichannel journeys as a whole:
- Core KPIs like CSAT and Resolution Rate are tracked by 85–88% of organizations for assisted solutions, but only 45–55% of organizations track those same metrics for unassisted solutions and multichannel journeys.
This creates a blind spot. If a company isn’t consistently measuring the experience across the full multichannel journey, it’s much harder to know where breakdowns are happening, let alone fix them. As the report puts it: what isn’t measured isn’t managed.
The Pain Points Customers Actually Report
When CX leaders were asked which type of negative customer care experience is most likely to occur at their organization, the top two answers reinforce the multichannel consistency problem directly:
- 39% pointed to “Inconsistent Service” — the single most common answer.
- 27% pointed to “Lack of Resolution/Follow-Up.”
Together, these two issues account for two-thirds of the negative experiences CX leaders flag as most likely, and both stem from the same underlying issue: journeys that aren’t orchestrated, tracked, or handed off well across channels.
What This Means for CX Leaders
The report’s broader conclusion is direct: execution, not intent, is the central challenge. Digital capabilities are expanding, AI is being layered into more channels, and consumer expectations for seamless, low-effort resolution keep rising. But the operational plumbing (data continuity, cross-channel handoffs, and end-to-end measurement) hasn’t kept pace.
For CX leaders looking to close this gap, the data points to a few clear starting points:
- Build (or expand) redundancy-reduction processes. With only 38% of organizations addressing repeat-information friction, this is a high-visibility, high-impact fix.
- Extend measurement to multichannel and unassisted journeys, not just assisted channels. You can’t manage what you don’t track.
- Treat “inconsistent service” as a named, trackable failure mode, not just an abstract complaint, since it’s the single most common negative experience CX leaders themselves report.
Multichannel isn’t a future-state initiative anymore. It’s already how the overwhelming majority of customers engage. The organizations that win will stop treating consistency as an aspiration and start treating it as an operational metric.
Join Us at CRS Scottsdale (Sept. 30 – Oct. 2)
The consistency gap explored in this article is only the beginning of the conversation.
At CRS Scottsdale, don’t miss our main stage panel, The Rise of Multimodal Customer Experience: Are We Moving Too Fast?, featuring leaders from Google, 1-800-GOT-JUNK, and Cox, as they dig into omnichannel and whether the race toward AI-powered, multimodal journeys is leaving parts of your customer base behind.
