Customer care leaders are facing their greatest challenge in decades. They must prepare their organizations for an AI-enabled future while simultaneously meeting tough commercial targets and rising customer expectations. Our latest global survey suggests that many companies are struggling on all these fronts.

Major disruptions are always painful, and the transition from a care paradigm dominated by human agents to one steered by AI technologies may be the biggest disruption in the history of customer service. Can organizations find a route to hyperefficient, digitized customer care while retaining the personal contact and responsiveness that customers require?

Right now, many customer care leaders feel trapped in no-man’s-land. Technology has enabled them to evolve their operations significantly, and the traditional call center environment is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Yet when these digitally enabled models underperform—and they often do—companies need to master entirely new approaches to performance improvement alongside their traditional tool kits.

To make matters worse, executives say that most of the challenges highlighted in our last survey are still present today (see sidebar, “Customer care in the spotlight”). Those challenges include rising call volumes, high levels of employee attrition, and persistent talent shortages. Meanwhile, some of the largest consumer-facing technology organizations in the world have become exceptional at digitally enabled customer care, which is lifting customer expectations everywhere, piling further pressure onto customer care staff and leadership at other companies.