Our annual benchmark study covers 1,400 support and customer operations teams across SaaS, e-commerce, financial services and logistics, spanning teams of five agents to several hundred. It is designed to answer the question every operations leader is asked in planning season: is our performance normal, and where should the next hire or the next automation go?
Headline findings
- Messaging channels overtook email as the primary inbound channel for the first time in the e-commerce and logistics segments.
- Teams reporting the highest satisfaction were not the fastest, they were the most consistent, with the narrowest spread between median and 90th-percentile response times.
- Automation investment shifted decisively from scripted chatbots to AI assistance inside the agent workflow.
- Repeat contact rate emerged as the metric most strongly associated with account retention, ahead of both satisfaction score and first response time.
What is in the data
Response and resolution benchmarks are broken out by channel, company size and segment, with percentile distributions rather than averages alone. The staffing section covers agent-to-customer ratios, quality assurance coverage and how teams structure overnight support. The automation section reports adoption, scope and, unusually for this kind of study, the share of teams that rolled something back.
Methodology
Responses were collected over eight weeks and combined with anonymised aggregate platform metrics where participants opted in, which lets us compare what teams believe about their performance with what their systems record. The gap between the two is one of the more instructive parts of the report.
How teams use it
Most readers use the benchmark tables directly in planning documents to justify headcount or tooling investment. The percentile view matters here: arguing for investment against a median is much weaker than showing where you sit in a distribution and what the next quartile costs to reach.