Brought to you by Zendesk
Customers are not waiting for brands to catch up. With AI now setting the standard for speed and personalisation, 83% of consumers believe customer experience should be far better than it already is. One unresolved issue is enough to lose a customer for life. The organisations pulling ahead are not simply using AI. They are using it with context, memory, and intelligence built in.
What You Will Learn
This report draws on insights from more than 11,000 consumers and CX leaders across 22 countries. It identifies five trends shaping customer experience in 2026 and beyond, showing what high maturity organisations are doing differently and what it is costing those who fall behind.
The five trends covered:
- Memory rich AI: How leading brands are replacing one off interactions with continuous, personalised conversations that customers actually remember.
- AI powered self service: Why instant resolution is now the baseline and how organisations are meeting it without scaling headcount.
- Multimodal support: How customers are communicating across voice, video, and text in a single interaction and why 76% say they would choose a brand that lets them do it.
- Promptable analytics: How natural language querying is putting real time insight into the hands of everyone, not just analysts.
- AI transparency: Why consumers now want to understand the reasoning behind automated decisions and how to turn that into a trust advantage.
The numbers make the case
CX leaders say memory rich AI is the key to truly personalised journeys. High maturity organisations are twice as likely to report a boost in customer satisfaction as a result. And 97% of Zendesk customers report a positive return on their AI investment over the last 12 months.
The gap between high and low maturity organisations is widening fast. The brands that act now will be significantly harder to catch.
Download the 2026 CX Trends Report below to find out where your organisation stands and what it takes to lead.
