What Joseph is writing about right now
Nobody Actually Wants a Person
Here is the most useful customer experience finding of the year, and it cuts against what most of us say on stage.
Verint surveyed 5,000 U.S. consumers for its State of Customer Experience 2026 and found that preference for human agents rose five percent year over year, with the sharpest increase among 18- to 34-year-olds. The youngest, most digitally fluent customers are swinging hardest back toward people.
Then the same study asked a second question. Sixty-nine percent of the customers who said they preferred a human agent would take automated service instead — if it fully resolved their issue.
Read those together and the picture changes. People are not asking for a person because they love people. They are asking because the machine failed and a person is the only remaining path to a solved problem. “Get me a person” is not a preference. It is an escalation. Which means every time a customer says it, your technology just told on itself.
Four shifts keep you off that list.
Map the touchpoints before the tools
The same research found 42 percent of customers reporting higher expectations in 2026, up from 19 percent in 2024, and 51 percent saying businesses now fall short when they need help — a majority for the first time in five years of the study. Companies did not get worse that fast. The bar moved. Map against what customers currently consider normal, not against your own last baseline, or you will optimize a journey that stopped existing two years ago.
Decide which moments are memorable
Speed is the top driver of a good experience, and 78 percent of customers will abandon their preferred channel to get a faster resolution. But once they are inside an automated interaction, 42 percent say reaching a human matters more to them than speed alone. Speed wins right up until something goes wrong. Then presence wins. Those switching points are the moments worth staffing with people.
Automate for efficiency and dignity
In September 2026, ElevenLabs released an AI receptionist called Reception, built for plumbers, salons, clinics, and consultants. You paste in your website. Within minutes it knows your services, your hours, and your staff, and it starts answering your phone. Plans begin at twenty-nine dollars a month. Zoom and RingCentral sell their own versions.
The pitch is not a lie. When you are the owner, the technician, and the receptionist at once, a missed call is a lost customer. What quietly changes hands is the first hello, the first human moment between a business and someone who needs something. The question is not whether the technology works. It works. The question is what you are handing it, and whether your customers would still call if they knew.
Master the handoffs
Verint's companion study of 1,000 contact center agents found that 57 percent of calls require the agent to gather context when an issue is escalated to them. That is the customer repeating their story, counted from the other side of the desk. The failure is rarely the bot or the agent. It is that nothing traveled across the gap between them.
This is the problem I keep getting asked about from the stage, and the one I spend a book on in Get Me a Person. Nobody asks whether the technology works anymore. They ask which moments to refuse to automate, and how to defend that call to a board.
The takeaway
Count how many times a week a customer asks one of your people for a human. Every instance is a receipt for something your technology failed to finish. That number is a better read on your AI strategy than any dashboard you are currently paying for.
Sources
Josh Ballard, “The State of Customer Experience 2026 Report: 5 Trends Every CX Leader Needs to Know,” Verint, May 12, 2026. Survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers.
Harry Rollason, “Introducing The State of Agent Experience 2026 Report,” Verint, April 14, 2026. Survey of 1,000 contact center agents.
Robert Hou and Janek Kociszewski, “Introducing Reception, by ElevenAgents,” ElevenLabs, September 16, 2026. Pricing reported in Inc., “This Startup Is Now Offering an AI Receptionist for Just $29 a Month.”
