The era of expediency: Why voice is becoming the fastest path to revenue

This article originally appeared on Forbes Business Council.

A few years ago, my wedding suit almost didn’t make it to the wedding. My wife was not thrilled. I had ordered a custom suit from a tailor in Canada, but Covid shut down travel, so I paid to have it overnighted to my house in New Jersey. What should have been routine turned into a logistical loop: the package cleared customs, arrived in Newark and somehow got routed back to Indianapolis to go through customs again.

For five days, I tried to fix it through digital channels: the app, text support and website forms. Every response followed the same automated script and ignored the fact that the package had already been misrouted. Eventually, I called support, but the IVR routed me through menus and departments without solving anything.

Finally, I tracked down the corporate number and called the president’s office directly. Within hours, the company located the package, rerouted it to Newark and dispatched a courier to my door. My suit arrived 24 hours before the ceremony.

That experience illustrates something companies still miss: Customers aren’t loyal to channels. They’re loyal to outcomes.

We're in an expediency-first world

For years, the customer experience (CX) conversation has been dominated by a single thesis: customers want digital. Build better apps. Add chat. Deflect calls. Channel preference, we thought, was the whole story. But customers don’t actually care about channels. They care about whether their problem gets solved quickly and accurately, without repeating themselves.​ I call it expediency, and it’s become the primary lens through which customers evaluate brands.​

When a channel delivers reliably, customers gravitate toward it. For pressing issues (think complaints, billing disputes, urgent requests), voice gets the job done best. A 2024 McKinsey survey of 3,500 consumers found that, across every age group, live phone conversations ranked among the most preferred ways to contact companies for help.

The generational story is complicated

The easy narrative goes like this: Boomers call, and Millennials and Gen Z text. Problem solved, channel strategy locked in.​ But that's not what behavioral data shows. Salesforce's State of the Connected Customer report found a smaller-than-expected generational gap: 58% of Baby Boomers preferred phone compared to 53% of Millennials and Gen Z.

Millennials grew up on text interfaces, but many revert to voice when the stakes are higher. Gen Z behaves similarly. McKinsey reports that when dealing with serious issues like banking or telecom, Gen Z customers often reach for the phone. One financial services company found that Gen Z customers were 30–40% more likely to call than Millennials and called as often as Baby Boomers. Remember, Gen Z grew up with Siri and Alexa. They have no stigma around voice, just zero patience for friction.

The lost package, revisited

My lost wedding suit situation truly illustrated the difference between customer service and customer experience. I had done everything companies ask customers to do: use the app, check tracking, submit requests and text support. Each system processed my request, but none diagnosed the problem. When I finally reached someone who could act, the issue was resolved quickly. The package was located, rerouted and delivered.

The lesson isn’t that digital channels are bad. They’re excellent for simple tasks. But for complex or important issues, voice often wins out. The Salesforce research captures why this matters commercially: 78% of customers expect to solve complex problems by speaking to one person, and two-thirds say they’ll switch brands if treated like a number. The emotional texture of an interaction is a retention driver. ​

I know I became a loyal customer after the shipping company went to such lengths to make my problem their problem. But that loyalty could have been lost if I hadn’t made it beyond the frustrating digital loop I was initially caught up in.

Trust is a revenue line item

Microsoft's Global State of Customer Service research found that service quality impacts brand choice and loyalty for 90% of consumers. Nearly every customer is making a loyalty decision when something goes wrong.​

When customers experience repeated effortless resolution, they build psychological safety with a brand. They stop comparison shopping, expand their spending and tell people. It shows up in retention curves and lifetime value data for organizations that have shifted from reactive to proactive service.

What technology finally makes this possible

Of course, a direct line to the company president isn’t a scalable solution. Speed, scale and personal attention have not historically coexisted. AI changes that equation.

Today’s systems can carry forward full interaction history, understand intent mid-sentence, detect sentiment shifts and adjust tone and pacing in real time. That means when a customer calls, they’re not starting over. The system already knows what they bought, what went wrong and whether they’re frustrated. That memory creates expediency. No repetition. No re-verification loops. No being transferred three times. The conversation begins where the last one left off.

A challenge to CX leaders

If you’re running revenue or customer success at a company with a meaningful support operation, here’s the question worth sitting with: Are you measuring the right things?​

Deflection rate is a 2010 metric that made sense when the goal was cost containment. The technology can now do better, but measurement frameworks haven’t caught up. ​Salesforce found that 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products. So how do you know if you’re providing the kind of service that will make people stick around? ​

Track the right metrics: resolution speed, first-contact resolution rate, post-interaction retention and revenue per resolved interaction. Those tell you whether your CX is building trust that compounds or slowly leaking it.​

For anything with emotional stakes, financial complexity or time pressure (the interactions that most directly affect how customers feel about your brand), voice, done right, is the fastest path to resolution. And expedient resolution is the fastest path to revenue.