A chat team can hit its SLA and a voice team can hit its AHT, and customers can still be unhappy. That happens when conversations jump channels and lose continuity. The customer effort lives in the gaps, not in the channel reports.

The signal is repeat explaining. Customers reopen tickets because the email reply ignores what they already said on chat. Agents struggle to find history because it lives across systems. AI summaries are inconsistent by channel.

Teams that fix this treat the customer journey as the unit of work. They route by intent, not by channel, and they standardise what context must travel with the conversation. When continuity improves, performance improves everywhere without changing staffing.