Four reasons the pressure is hitting harder than ever
Most leaders are already feeling it. What’s harder to pin down is why the pressure has gotten this intense, this fast. Two subject matter experts at Foundever, Steve Gush, VP of Service Line CX, and Andy Thuemmel, Global AI Transformation Leader, identified four core reasons for the pressure. Here is what they said.
1. Board-level AI investment is funded by squeezing operations
A lot of the burden CX leaders feel started in the boardroom rather than the contact center.
“Cost pressure is coming from board-level decisions to make increased investments in technology,” Steve explained, “and that money has to come from somewhere. So, the operations get pressure.”
The pattern shows up clearly in the survey data. In tech and manufacturing, 78% of leaders are already investing in generative AI for agent assist, yet AI integration ranks just fourth among what those same leaders call urgent business challenges, cited by only 37%. Investment is running well ahead of proven need, which is exactly what happens when a decision starts at the board level rather than the operations floor. Leadership commits significant budget to new technology, often AI, and that spending has to be funded from somewhere. Often, operations absorbs the difference. CX leaders end up managing the fallout of a decision they didn’t make, with less budget to do more.
This investment frequently fails to deliver the value leadership is expecting, and the operations floor is usually why. Those are the teams who understand the business, the customers and the workflows better than anyone. When they’re squeezed instead of brought into the technology build, that knowledge never makes it into the design. What comes out the other end is an investment that looks strong in a boardroom deck but doesn’t hold up in daily operations.
2. Stretched consumers are pushing costs back onto the business
The second driver is bigger than any one company’s strategy because it’s macroeconomic.
Consumers are dealing with dramatically higher costs across the board, and their tolerance for absorbing price increases has thinned. That same math shows up on the business side, too: in healthcare, hospital costs climbed 7.5% in a single year, more than double the rate prices rose. Whether it’s consumers pushing back directly or pricing structures that can’t keep pace, the gap has to be absorbed somewhere, and it rarely comes out of the customer’s pocket.
That leaves businesses with a narrowing set of options: raise prices and risk losing customers, or find efficiency elsewhere to protect margins without passing along the cost.
For most CX organizations, “finding efficiency elsewhere” lands squarely on the cost-to-serve line.
3. Legacy infrastructure is getting more expensive to run
For established, larger organizations, there’s a third pressure that’s less visible but just as real: the cost of keeping old systems running. That cost is bigger than most people realize. Research on bank IT spending found that companies pay an additional 10% to 20% on top of any project cost specifically to address technical debt, and about 30% of CIOs surveyed said more than 20% of their budget meant for new products gets diverted to resolving legacy issues instead. That weight compounds every year the system stays in place, and it has nowhere to go but into the operations budget.
The pressure is sharpest in banking, where six in ten leaders say they’re squeezed by neobank competition, digital-first challengers with no legacy infrastructure to maintain, forced to cut costs without giving regulators a reason to worry.
One U.K. bank is a case in point: by bringing intelligent automation into its back-office work, the bank saved 800,000 FTE hours and accurately handled 30,000 transactions a day. Legacy cost pressure isn’t permanent once the right approach is in place.
4. Competitive pressure is creating a bandwagon effect
The fourth driver is less about internal numbers and more about what’s happening across the street.
Once one competitor visibly cuts costs and their results improve, “why are we not doing that?” becomes a hard question to avoid inside your own leadership meetings.
That competitive visibility creates pressure to follow suit, even for organizations that don’t have a clear internal cost problem driving the decision. It’s a bandwagon effect, and it compounds the other three pressures already in play.
The pattern underneath all four pressures
None of these four pressures are about CX teams doing their jobs poorly. Board decisions, consumer economics, legacy costs and competitive dynamics are all forces largely outside a CX leader’s direct control, yet the pressure to absorb them still lands on operations.
That’s the story behind the cost-to-serve numbers: it’s hardly ever just one thing. It’s four different pressures converging on the same budget line at the same time, which is why a narrow fix, cutting headcount or tacking on a single new tool hardly ever solves it for long.
Leading organizations treat cost-to-serve as a structural question, rethinking where technology investment pays off, how legacy costs get modernized and how efficiency gets built in without customers or employees feeling the squeeze.
Andy Thuemmel has seen that shift firsthand: organizations that once handled everything in-house are increasingly open to bringing in outside expertise to help carry the load.
That often means augmenting the people already on the team rather than starting over. Tools like EverAssist, Foundever’s real-time AI copilot for agents, and EverCoach, its AI-powered performance coaching solution, are built around that idea, giving agents real-time support and coaching so the same team handles more, and handles it better.
To understand more about cost-to-serve pressures across all industries, we analyzed survey results from 221 senior CX decision-makers across eight industries to find out what’s keeping them up at night, and identified what the leaders furthest ahead are doing differently. Check out the “CX complexity guide: 3 complex issues every CX leader is facing” to learn more.