{
  "id": 7959431,
  "title": "The customer service gap no one is fixing",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/17/the-customer-service-gap-no-one-is-fixing",
  "topic": "business",
  "section": "Business",
  "published": "2026-09-17T05:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Fast Company",
    "slug": "fast-company",
    "url": "https://www.fastcompany.com/91607707/the-customer-service-gap-no-one-is-fixing"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "A recent survey of 300 marketing, sales, and service executives conducted by KPMG revealed a significant disconnect between companies' perceived performance and their customers' actual experiences. While the companies reported strong leads, engagement, and sales, as well as improvements in response times, customers often faced frustrating handoffs between chatbots, agents, and intervention specialists. Despite these green dashboards, customers reported experiencing the problem four times, with the company unable to remember their conversation just a minute ago. This discrepancy between the company's performance and the customer's experience highlights the critical need to address handoffs, which are often the weak link in customer service. Despite the clear evidence, only 5% of companies have fully integrated customer-facing functions, while 87% acknowledged that integration is essential to improving the customer experience. The survey found that companies that grew revenue at 10% or better were three times more likely to be fully integrated compared to their peers. The primary barriers to integration include legacy systems, disconnected data, and a lack of focus on customer experience spending. To bridge this gap, companies must prioritize designing handoffs carefully and assign clear ownership for each key customer moment. Additionally, they should make back-office data and system cleanups a priority, as this will enable a unified view of the customer across all functions.",
  "summary": "Ask your department heads how things are going, and you’ll hear good news. Leads and engagement are up, sales hit quota, and customer service is chipping away at response time. Every dashboard is green. But ask your customer, the one that’s been passed along three times in five minutes between chatbots and agents and intervention specialists, and you’ll get a different report. Because she’s…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}