How to Reduce Customer Effort Without Increasing Service Costs

Every service improvement should answer a question: did we remove work, or did we just transfer work to the customer? A shorter call or a completed chatbot session can look efficient to the business while actually requiring customers to gather documents, contact another department, follow up afterward, or take any number of additional actions.

Businesses measure what it costs them to serve customers. But how much does getting help demand of the customer in terms of their time, effort, and patience? CX leaders need to measure both. A change that lowers service costs but leaves customers doing more work is only solving half the problem.

What is the Cost of Being Your Customer?

It is the effort someone spends obtaining the service they need, beyond the price they pay. It includes finding help, waiting, explaining the issue, repeating steps they already completed, coordinating departments, and chasing an outcome.

Some of that cost is measurable in minutes or repeat contacts. Some appear as uncertainty: can I stop thinking about this, or do I need to check again tomorrow?

The importance of customer effort is well established. In their 2010 Harvard Business Review article, Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman emphasized reducing repeat contacts and unnecessary channel changes. Gartner’s 2024 research on service journeys likewise links unnecessary effort with weaker retention.

The opportunity now is to make customer burden part of every AI investment decision. When a process becomes cheaper for the enterprise, leaders should ask what happened to the work on the other side of the interaction.

What Does Avaya’s Consumer Research Reveal About Customer Effort?

The findings show how often resolution involves additional work. In Customer Experience on Their Terms, Avaya asked U.S. consumers about their most recent customer-service experience:

• 47% said their issue was resolved during the first interaction.
• 31% said resolution required more than one interaction.
• 51% cited long wait times as making the experience more difficult.
• 49% cited transfers between people or departments
• 47% cited having to repeat information.

These findings put familiar service problems into business terms. Every avoidable repeat contact not only creates more work for the organization but also consumes customer attention. Every transfer without context asks either the agent or the customer to bridge a gap between systems or teams.

Can AI Lower Operating Costs While Increasing Customer Burden?

Yes. That can happen when automation completes a local task but leaves the customer responsible for the next step.

Imagine a billing assistant that identifies a duplicate charge, provides a form, and ends the conversation. The customer then submits information already supplied, contacts billing to check progress, and explains the issue again. The interaction may be recorded as handled, but the work continues.

This concern also appears in Qualtrics’ 2026 Consumer Experience Trends research, published in October 2025. Nearly one in five consumers who had used AI for customer service reported no benefit from the experience. That finding suggests testing whether automation saves customers time and helps them complete their task.

McKinsey’s analysis of agentic CX makes a related operational point: automating an individual workflow without clarifying decisions, context, and escalation can preserve fragmentation while making the process faster.

For the billing example, the design question is whether the system can initiate the permitted correction, preserve the case history, and provide useful confirmation. If an employee must decide, that person should receive the completed work.

How Does Avaya Infinity Help Reduce Customer Effort?

Avaya Infinity provides an orchestration layer connecting customer interactions with enterprise data, AI, people, and workflows. That gives organizations a way to address the disconnections that create customer burden.

How Can Customers Avoid Repeating Themselves?

Avaya Infinity helps carry relevant history, intent, and interaction context across channels and between AI and human agents. That supports continuity when a customer moves from chat to voice or needs specialist help.

In Avaya’s channel-continuity question, 91% wanted previous context carried forward in some form. That includes different preferences for automatic continuation, permission each time, or transfer on request. Continuity should respect those choices.

How Can Customers Reach Knowledgeable Help?

The Avaya Infinity platform can use context to inform routing and coordinate AI with human expertise. Employees can start with relevant information and prior attempts, making the handoff more useful.

In the report’s question about what would improve service generally, 71% selected easy access to a knowledgeable person when needed. Another 32% selected automated systems that fully resolve simple requests. Respondents could choose up to two. Both findings support designing around what the situation requires.

How Can a Conversation Lead to Completed Work?

Avaya Infinity connects interactions to workflows across front- and back-office systems. Organizations can trigger actions, route follow-up work, update connected systems, and track progress under enterprise policies and permissions.

The opportunity is to reduce the follow-up the customer must initiate. The actual journey depends on the connected systems, the authority granted, and the enterprise process.

How Should Leaders Measure Customer Burden?

Start with one common customer journey and connect the records that describe it. Contact-center reporting, CRM or case-management systems, workforce engagement tools with interaction analytics, and customer surveys can each contribute a piece of the picture.

Link interactions to the same customer issue or case, then bring these measures into a customer burden dashboard:

These measures produce concrete numbers. For example, if 250 of 1,000 tracked cases generate another customer-initiated contact about the same issue within a defined follow-up period, the repeat-contact rate is 25%. This is an illustrative calculation, not a research finding.

Where systems and identifiers are connected, reporting can automate much of the collection and calculation. Customer feedback and targeted reviews help identify gaps, including work done outside service channels.

Establish a baseline, improve one source of avoidable effort, and compare equivalent cases using the same definitions and observation periods. Track unresolved cases alongside completed ones so difficult journeys remain visible.

Keep these measures separate and pair them with cost per resolved case. The goal is to demonstrate that an efficiency improvement also reduces the work required of the customer.

Where Should an Enterprise Start?

Choose a common request, such as correcting a bill or rescheduling an appointment. Follow it from the first attempt to obtain help through completed resolution. Ask employees where they lose context or must send customers elsewhere.

Then redesign one source of avoidable effort. Carry previously supplied information into the next step, connect an approved workflow, or prepare a specialist handoff. Compare customer burden, resolution, and operating cost before and after the change, using comparable cases.

Avaya Infinity provides a foundation for connecting that work across the enterprise. Leadership commits to judging progress by how much easier it becomes for someone to get the help they need.

Read Customer Experience on Their Terms and explore Avaya Infinity to identify where your organization can reduce the cost of being your customer.

About the Research

Avaya’s Customer Experience on Their Terms is part of the Avaya Connected Consumer Research Series. The online survey was fielded in September 2026 among U.S. adults aged 18 and older. The study provides directional insight into consumer experiences and preferences.