The statistics library

612 sourced numbers on customer support

The figures cited across reports, landscape guides, benchmarks, and dispatches — each traceable to its linked source and context. Repeated figures stay separate when their publication context differs. Copy a citation or share a number straight to LinkedIn.

612 numbers

9 in 10

CX and support leaders who say human-handled calls are getting more complex as automation absorbs routine volume (n=300)

Cresta contact-center leader survey (via CX Current) Insight: The empathy tax: emotional labor in support work

31%

Contact center agents likely to leave their current role within the next six months

Verint, The State of Agent Experience 2026 (via No Jitter) Insight: The empathy tax: emotional labor in support work

46%

Agents aged 18-34 likely to leave within six months, versus just 8% of agents 45 and older

Verint, The State of Agent Experience 2026 (via No Jitter) Insight: The empathy tax: emotional labor in support work

$19.34/hr

Average hourly pay for a US customer support representative (range $13.92-$24.76)

Payscale, Customer Support Representative Hourly Rate Insight: The empathy tax: emotional labor in support work

47%

Agents naming unrealistic performance expectations as their biggest frustration (45% cite lack of schedule flexibility)

Verint, The State of Agent Experience 2026 (via No Jitter) Insight: The empathy tax: emotional labor in support work

10%

higher customer loyalty/engagement at business units in the top quartile of employee engagement versus the bottom quartile (meta-analysis of 183,806 units)

Gallup, Q12 Meta-Analysis, 11th edition, 2024 Insight: Agent experience is the CX you forgot

2.3–3.8%

higher annual stock returns at companies with high employee-experience quality; Forrester frames strong EX as a structural advantage in hitting CX targets

Forrester Employee Experience Index (via CX Today), 2026 Insight: Agent experience is the CX you forgot

~4 hrs/week

time knowledge workers lose reorienting after switching between apps — roughly 1,200 toggles a day, about 9% of the workday

Harvard Business Review, 'How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications?', 2022 Insight: Agent experience is the CX you forgot

95%

of customer-service workers say the pressure of the role lowers their productivity; over 80% say it weighs on their mental wellbeing

DigitalGenius / Censuswide survey (via Customer Experience Dive) Insight: Agent experience is the CX you forgot

31%

of contact-center agents say they are likely to leave within six months; 47% name unrealistic performance targets as their single biggest frustration

Verint, The State of Agent Experience 2026 (via No Jitter) Insight: Agent experience is the CX you forgot

60%

Occupancy a team taking 50 contacts an hour runs at once it's staffed to hit service level — small teams sit structurally below the efficient band, not because they're slacking

Assembled, How to use Erlang C to plan staffing Insight: Workforce management for teams too small for Erlang C

83.3%

Average maximum occupancy target contact-centre professionals feed into the Erlang staffing calculator — the efficient band a four-person queue can't safely reach

Call Centre Helper, How to Calculate Occupancy in the Contact Centre, 2024 Insight: Workforce management for teams too small for Erlang C

30 → 83 sec

Average speed of answer when a 10-agent centre loses a single agent; a 50-agent centre losing one only slips from 30 to 50 seconds — small teams are structurally fragile

Society of Workforce Planning Professionals, The Power of One in Call Center Staffing Insight: Workforce management for teams too small for Erlang C

30–35%

Typical share of paid agent time lost to shrinkage — breaks, training, meetings, absence — that never reaches the queue; Dimension Data's global benchmark is 35%

Call Centre Helper, How to Calculate Contact Centre Shrinkage Insight: Workforce management for teams too small for Erlang C

74%

Consumers who expect customer service to be available 24/7 — a coverage floor that doesn't scale down for small teams

Zendesk CX Trends 2026 Insight: Workforce management for teams too small for Erlang C

88%

Customers who now expect faster responses than they did a year ago — the tolerance for an understaffed peak keeps shrinking

Zendesk CX Trends 2026 Insight: Workforce management for teams too small for Erlang C

31%

of contact-center agents say they are likely to leave their role within the next six months

Verint, The State of Agent Experience 2026 (via No Jitter) Insight: Burnout in support: the numbers, the causes, what actually helps

46%

of agents aged 18-34 are likely to leave within six months — versus just 8% of agents 45 and over

Verint, The State of Agent Experience 2026 (via No Jitter) Insight: Burnout in support: the numbers, the causes, what actually helps

>80%

of call-center workers say the pressure of the role weighs on their mental wellbeing, with 95% reporting it lowers their productivity

DigitalGenius / Censuswide survey (via Customer Experience Dive) Insight: Burnout in support: the numbers, the causes, what actually helps

47%

of agents name unrealistic performance expectations their biggest frustration (45% cite a lack of schedule flexibility)

Verint, The State of Agent Experience 2026 (via No Jitter) Insight: Burnout in support: the numbers, the causes, what actually helps

r = 0.42

the correlation between emotional labour (emotional dissonance) and affective discomfort among inbound call-center agents

Frontiers in Psychology, 'Inbound Call Centers and Emotional Dissonance in the Job Demands-Resources Model' Insight: Burnout in support: the numbers, the causes, what actually helps

9 in 10

of CX leaders say human-handled calls are getting more complex as automation absorbs the routine volume

Cresta contact-center leader survey (via CX Current) Insight: Burnout in support: the numbers, the causes, what actually helps

20%

global employee engagement in 2025 — the lowest level since 2020

Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 Report Insight: Burnout in support: the numbers, the causes, what actually helps

C$812

in damages the BC Civil Resolution Tribunal ordered Air Canada to pay after its website chatbot invented a bereavement-fare refund policy — rejecting the airline's claim the bot was a 'separate legal entity.'

CBC News, Feb 2024 Insight: When the Bot Makes Things Up

the price a Chevrolet dealer's ChatGPT-backed chatbot agreed to sell a ~$76,000 Tahoe for — 'a legally binding offer, no takesies backsies' — after a user steered the conversation.

VentureBeat, Dec 2023 Insight: When the Bot Makes Things Up

0.8-2%

the hallucination rate of top models even when asked only to summarize a single document handed to them — grounding lowers the rate, but never to zero.

Vectara Hallucination Leaderboard Insight: When the Bot Makes Things Up

1 in 6

queries on which purpose-built, retrieval-backed legal AI tools still hallucinated — despite marketing that promised 'hallucination-free' citations (Lexis+ AI >17%, Westlaw >34%).

Stanford HAI / RegLab, 2024 Insight: When the Bot Makes Things Up

$290K

the value of the government report Deloitte's Australian firm partly refunded after it was found to contain AI-fabricated academic citations and an invented quote from a Federal Court judgment.

Fortune, Oct 2025 Insight: When the Bot Makes Things Up

84%

of consumers said human representatives gave them more accurate information than chatbots did.

BusinessWire consumer survey, Apr 2025 Insight: When the Bot Makes Things Up

76.9 / 100

the US national customer satisfaction score — essentially flat and no higher than 2017, despite a decade of dashboards

American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), National Q4 2025 Press Release Insight: How to build a support scorecard your team doesn't hate

7 minutes

the industry benchmark average handle time — a useful number that turns toxic the moment it becomes a target on its own

SQM Group, Call Center Industry Standards / KPI Benchmarks Insight: How to build a support scorecard your team doesn't hate

70%

the average first-call resolution rate across industries — the counter-metric that keeps handle time honest

SQM Group, Call Center Industry Standards / KPI Benchmarks Insight: How to build a support scorecard your team doesn't hate

88%

the benchmark internal quality score from QA conversation reviews — proof quality can be a number, not a vibe

Zendesk QA (Klaus), Customer Service Quality Benchmark Report 2023 (cited on Zendesk blog) Insight: How to build a support scorecard your team doesn't hate

63%

of consumers will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience — up 9% year on year

Zendesk CX Trends 2025 Report Insight: How to build a support scorecard your team doesn't hate

of CX leaders are confident their measurement system enables real strategic and tactical decisions - even though 93% rely on surveys as their primary CX metric

McKinsey, 'Prediction: The future of CX' (survey of 260+ CX leaders) Insight: The Voice of Customer program that actually changes something

of CX leaders say their measurement system lets them calculate the ROI of a CX decision

McKinsey, 'Prediction: The future of CX' Insight: The Voice of Customer program that actually changes something

5 in 100

share of customer interactions a transactional survey program actually captures feedback on

Forrester, 'Many Surveys, Small Impact' - 2023 State of VoC and CX Measurement Survey Insight: The Voice of Customer program that actually changes something

1 in 26

unhappy customers who bother to complain - the rest just leave without a word

ThinkJar (Esteban Kolsky), via Customer Experience Magazine Insight: The Voice of Customer program that actually changes something

27%

of VoC and CX measurement programs communicate their insights to stakeholders in a timely way

Forrester, 2025 State of Feedback Management (VoC) and CX Measurement Survey Insight: The Voice of Customer program that actually changes something

50%

of VoC teams can successfully link their CX metrics to business outcomes

Forrester, 2025 State of Feedback Management (VoC) and CX Measurement Survey Insight: The Voice of Customer program that actually changes something

Below 10%

Recommended call transfer rate target — every transfer adds time, drops customer effort score, and risks a dropped call

JustCall, 30 Essential Call Center Metrics & KPIs to Track in 2026 Insight: The transfer rate nobody watches

16%

Lower first-contact resolution when a call needs a second agent to resolve it ('agent-assisted') — and that happens on roughly 1 in 5 calls

SQM Group, Call Center Industry Standards / KPI Benchmarks Insight: The transfer rate nobody watches

56%

Customers who say they routinely have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives

Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer, 6th Edition (2023) Insight: The transfer rate nobody watches

55%

Customers who feel they generally engage with separate departments rather than one unified company

Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer, 6th Edition (2023) Insight: The transfer rate nobody watches

96%

Customers with a high-effort service interaction who became more disloyal — versus just 9% of low-effort ones

Dixon, Freeman & Toman, 'Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers,' Harvard Business Review (CEB/Gartner research) Insight: The transfer rate nobody watches

63%

Consumers who say they'll switch to a competitor after a single bad experience — up 9 points year on year

Zendesk CX Trends 2025 Report Insight: The transfer rate nobody watches

8.59 / 10

average CSAT across every response collected through Nicereply's surveys

Nicereply, Benchmarking CSAT, NPS, and CES (2024) Insight: Your CSAT response rate is lying to you

76.9 / 100

US national cross-industry customer satisfaction, essentially flat and no higher than 2017

American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), National Q4 2025 Press Release Insight: Your CSAT response rate is lying to you

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