Milton Keynes, 3rd November 2026 – Businesses take an average of 13 days to fix customer problems once they’ve been identified, according to new research from Serve First, the AI-powered operational excellence platform.
Based on a survey of 250 UK customer experience (CX) leaders and decision-makers, the data reveals that just 14% of businesses typically resolve an identified customer issue within a day, while more than a third (34%) take at least a week.
For the CX industry, collecting customer feedback is only part of the challenge. Ensuring those insights lead to action is proving more difficult. More than half (56%) of respondents say traditional CX platforms make problems easier to identify than to solve, while the same proportion say customer insight does not reach frontline teams quickly enough.
Meanwhile, 55% of respondents say too many customer issues remain unresolved despite being identified. When issues remain unresolved, customers can continue to experience the same problems.
Technology intended to help businesses manage the customer experience can also contribute to this gap between insight and action. Organisations use an average of 3.4 CX platforms, with 87% using at least two. When insight is spread across multiple systems and reports, it can become harder to get it to the frontline teams who can act on it.
Despite the amount of customer insight available to CX teams, relatively little time is focused on acting on those issues, with just 6% of those surveyed saying they spend most of their time driving operational improvements.
CX leaders also see improving business operations as key to delivering better customer experience. Three quarters (75%) agree that improving customer experience starts with improving business operations, while 71% believe CX should form part of a broader operational excellence strategy.
Erol Ayvaz, CEO and co-founder of Serve First, comments on the findings: “The fact that known customer issues take an average of thirteen days to resolve shows exactly what’s broken about the current approach to customer experience. Over that period, the same problem can affect more customers, create more work for staff and seriously damage trust in the business.
“A lot of businesses have invested heavily in collecting feedback, but the handover into day-to-day operations is still too slow. The person who sees the report is often not the one running the site and the problem might need to be fixed by a different team or supplier. When those people are working across different systems, even feedback highlighting a serious customer problem can quickly lose momentum.
“People give feedback because they think it will make a difference. But that feedback needs to reach the person who can deal with it. They need to know what’s expected and by when, and the business needs to check that the problem has been resolved. Otherwise, all that the business has done is create a more detailed record of the failure.”
To download the full CX is Broken report and benchmark your organisation against the findings, click here.
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