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Despite massive investments in AI tools, new research from Front reveals that B2B customer experience teams are struggling with a growing coordination burden, with AI often creating more work rather than alleviating it.
B2B organizations report spending three hours coordinating work for every hour spent resolving customer problems.
93% of companies use AI in customer operations, yet 71% reported significant issues in just the past three months.
24% of teams said AI created more coordination work, 22% reported lost context during handoffs, and 20% saw requests routed incorrectly.
More than one-third of teams lost a high performer to coordination burnout last year.
42% of companies do not track coordination at all, leaving the biggest source of inefficiency invisible.
One in seven organizations has successfully flipped the equation by building coordination into their systems rather than layering on task automation.
AI was supposed to make customer experience faster, easier, and more efficient. However, for many B2B teams, it is doing the exact opposite. According to a study of 700 B2B customer service, operations, and account management leaders conducted by Front, the systems companies rely on were not built for how B2B work actually gets done. Layering AI on top has done little to solve the underlying problem.
The real challenge in B2B customer experience is not answering questions—as is often the case in B2C, where requests are simple and come from a single channel. Instead, the difficulty lies in coordinating the people, systems, and context required to actually resolve issues. In B2B, problems can originate anywhere and span multiple teams, leaving staff chasing information, switching between tools, and aligning across the business just to move work forward.
When AI breaks, coordination is usually the culprit. The research found that 24% of teams reported AI created more coordination work, 22% experienced lost context during handoffs, and 20% saw requests routed incorrectly. Even as companies upgraded their tools and layered in AI, the core work did not get easier. Resolution times improved on paper, but the effort required to solve complex issues stayed the same or increased.
As systems multiplied, so did the need to jump between them, pushing more work into side channels such as email, Slack, and meetings where critical context becomes fragmented and lost. The data reveals that teams spend nearly three times as long coordinating work as they do solving customer issues, a dynamic that has quietly become the norm.
The human toll is significant. More than one-third of teams lost a high performer to coordination burnout last year. Despite the widespread adoption of AI—with 93% of companies now using it in customer operations—71% reported significant issues within just the past three months. Compounding the problem, 42% of companies do not track coordination at all, leaving the largest source of inefficiency completely invisible to leadership.
While many organizations continue to struggle with coordination overhead, the report finds that one in seven organizations has successfully flipped the equation, spending more time solving customer issues than coordinating them. These organizations are taking a different approach: building coordination into their systems rather than layering on task automation.
“For years, companies have been sold the idea that faster responses and more automation would fix customer support,” said Dan O’Connell, CEO of Front. “But in B2B, customer issues don’t live in one inbox or one team. They cut across the entire business. Most support tools ignore that reality. So companies end up layering on more systems and more AI, while the real work of coordinating people, context, and decisions still happens manually. Teams are working around broken systems. AI won’t fix that. Until companies address the coordination gap, the problem won’t go away.”
“In B2B, customer issues bounce between support, operations, finance, and account managers before anyone can fully resolve them,” said Jakari Robinson at Flex-Tec. “Before Front, keeping track of that context meant digging through inboxes and Slack threads. Now we handle more than 700 customer emails a day with shared visibility across teams, so everyone sees the same conversation and we can resolve issues faster without things falling through the cracks.”
About Front
B2B companies, meet Front. The modern way to handle complex customer work—and yes, the newer, smarter (we’ll explain), and pretty cool alternative to the company that rhymes with “Henbesk.” Real B2B customer issues are messy. They don’t sit in one inbox or with one team. Front makes it easy: keeping teams in sync, making sure context doesn’t get lost, and equipping companies with AI that can actually handle complex customer work. More than 9,000 companies, including Uber Freight, Navan, and Stripe, rely on Front.
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