“Collapse of patience” leaves brands one bad CX moment from losing customers

Customer loyalty, once considered a buffer against the occasional bad experience, is losing its protective power.

That’s the stark warning from Zendesk regional vice president Kellie Hackney, who says Australian businesses are confronting a “collapse of patience”, where a single unresolved interaction can permanently sever the customer relationship.

Speaking to Marketing-Interactive, Hackney said the latest Zendesk CX trends report points to a structural shift in how consumers judge service experiences, driven largely by rising expectations shaped by AI-powered immediacy.

“We’re seeing customer service reach a tipping point where loyalty can be won or lost in a single transaction,” Hackney said.

Historically, she said, brand familiarity and accumulated goodwill often softened the impact of service failures. But the rules are very quickly being rewritten.

“If you had a bad experience with that organisation, the loyalty would kind of get you through, and it would retain the trust and the relationship. That poor experience is not just an unfortunate moment for the company, it’s now a total break in the relationship.”

The consequences, she said, are both emotional and commercial.

“Not only have I lost my loyalty from the customer and the revenue associated, but I’ve just handed my competitor a no acquisition cost.”

Hackney describes the shift not as gradual behavioural drift, but as something far more abrupt.

“It’s not just a gradual change. There’s a total break in it.”

A complete collapse

According to Zendesk’s research, two thirds of Australian CX leaders report customer patience has “completely collapsed” over the past 12 months, fundamentally altering the stakes of every interaction.

“In that climate, fast is no longer a competitive advantage. It’s the price of entry,” Hackney said. “And the stakes are incredibly high.”

Nine out of 10 CX leaders now believe failure to resolve an issue on the first touch risks losing the customer entirely.

“If you don’t resolve that issue on the first touch, the customer’s gone.”

The findings reflect broader tension across Australian boardrooms, where customer experience is increasingly viewed less as a support function and more as a retention and revenue strategy.

Hackney said organisations are rethinking the long-standing classification of CX as a cost centre.

“Good customer service is coming out of that cost centre bucket,” she said. “It’s becoming a core retention strategy.”

That shift is visible in executive structures, with chief customer officer roles gaining prominence within the C-suite. Companies, she said, are placing greater value not just on what they sell, but how customers experience it.

Technology is both driving and responding to the change. Zendesk, long associated with omnichannel service models, is now pushing what Hackney calls “multimodal interactions”.

“Omnichannel is not enough anymore,” she said. Customers no longer move predictably between channels. Instead, they flick between messaging, voice, visual interfaces and live support depending on context and urgency.

“Our brains are constantly digitally flicking. The experience needs to do the same thing.”

In practice, that means allowing a customer to begin a conversation via text, escalate seamlessly to voice, then shift to video or visual sharing without restarting the interaction.

“How many times do you grit your teeth having to repeat yourself?” Hackney said. “If a brand doesn’t remember a past issue, it doesn’t just feel inefficient. It feels indifferent.”

A defining benchmark for CX

This is where the concept of “contextual intelligence” enters the conversation. Hackney said delivering seamless, memory-rich interactions is emerging as the defining benchmark for CX performance in 2026.

“In an era of zero tolerance for friction, contextual intelligence becomes the foundation for long-lasting retention.”

The model relies on what Zendesk terms “memory-rich AI”, capable of synthesising past behaviours, preferences and sentiment into a unified customer view. Without that foundation, Hackney argues, AI risks functioning with “amnesia”.

“You can’t personalise your experience if your AI is siloed away from your order history or customer data.”

The rise of agentic AI systems is accelerating this transition.

Moving beyond early decision bots, agentic agents are designed not just to respond, but to act.

“They’re empowered to actually resolve the query,” Hackney said.

A simple return, refund or update can now be executed autonomously if it meets defined criteria, reserving human agents for high-value, emotionally complex interactions.

Hackney frames this balance as “high value, high empathetic”.

“The bot becomes the primary driver of repetitive resolution, while handing high empathetic interactions to a human.”

Cosmetics retailer Lush is an example of this shift to agentic AI can lift speed and productivity without hollowing out the experience.

Lush launched its AI agent Marvin using automation to absorb high-volume, repetitive customer queries and push more complex, high-empathy issues to human agents.

The shift has delivered a first contact resolution rate of around 60% handled entirely by AI, while maintaining a 93% customer satisfaction score.

The productivity impact has been material, with some 360 hours saved each month in improved customer service. Productivity jumped 17% and lifted manager productivity by 30%.

For Hackney, the point isn’t simply cost. It’s what the business does with the time it wins back. By taking volume work off the frontline, Lush has effectively reinvested its human capacity into the parts of customer experience that still require judgement, nuance and a personal touch.

“Marvin handles the bulk common questions, but importantly passes the context and memory of the interaction through to the human agent. They’ve done it while maintaining customer satisfaction scores, which is huge.”

The efficiency gains translated into hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual cost savings. For Australian CX leaders, Hackney said the mandate is becoming clearer.

“We need to move beyond piloting AI and into building contextually intelligent experiences.”

Disconnected AI experiments, she warned, risk eroding rather than strengthening trust.

“If a brand’s AI doesn’t have a direct line into the customer’s history and a clear reason for its decisions, it’s not building a relationship.”

Ultimately, Hackney argues these new insights reshape how businesses should think about loyalty itself.

“Loyalty is not a concept anymore. It can be a measurable KPI and a business driver.”

In a market defined by shrinking patience and rising expectations, she said brands are operating closer than ever to a breaking point.

“One unresolved issue and the customer’s gone.”