The insane support bill your CX report won’t explain
By Anne-Mieke Bovelett on March 18, 2026
Status: up to date
The broken journeys are in your reports and the cost is in your finance system… The explanation is in neither!
If accessibility were purely a sales problem, CX departments would have found it by now. They have not, which tells you something about where they are looking.
Avoidable support cost
Take 50,000 customers a year. According to the Qualtrics XM Institute Consumer Journeys Needing Improvement report 2025, more than half of all consumer interactions contain at least one broken journey. So let us say 25,000 of your customers hit a wall in self-service and a portion of them call instead. According to Gartner’s benchmarks on customer service costs, a self-service contact costs $1.84. A live assisted contact, by phone, chat, or email, costs $13.50. That is a difference of $11.66 per escalation. If just 10,000 of those 25,000 broken journeys result in a live contact, you are looking at $116,600 in avoidable support cost. Per year. And that is before you count the customers who did not call. They just left.
A 2023 Yext study of German consumers (in German, hail Google translate) found that 1 in 5 people who used a help page ended up buying from a different company because the search function was not useful. Among 18 to 34 year olds in Germany, that figure rises to 36%. Those customers do not appear in your support ticket volume. They appear in your churn rate, and nobody connects the two.
The gap that no one can explain
Here is what I keep running into. A company has invested seriously in CX. They have done the research, rewritten the FAQ, redesigned the contact flow, and retrained their agents. Even the dashboards got a polish. And there is still a residual gap. Escalation rates that will not fully come down, self-service journeys that keep failing for a portion of users, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) that refuses to move the way the program promised.
The CX team has run out of obvious explanations. Sure, the content is there and the technology is working, check. And the journey maps that were presented to the management with a lot of juiciness look fine on paper.
And absolutely nobody asks whether the interface is accessible.
That knowledge gap is not just some minor oversight! It is a structural blind spot sitting inside CX programs at organizations of every size, and it is costing them real money while they run another round of workshops to figure out what went wrong.
What the data has actually been measuring
The Qualtrics XM Institute Consumer Trends Report 2024 found that digital support is the weakest link in the customer journey, across 28,400 consumers in 26 countries. Purchase satisfaction sits at 86%. Digital support satisfaction sits at 64%. That is a 22-percentage-point gap. The same report found that customers are 2.7 times more likely to return after a positive digital support experience, the highest return multiplier of any channel and journey combination in the study.
And what about the upside?
The upside is well-documented. CX teams know it is there. They are just not finding it because they are simply not looking at the right variable.
Going back to those Consumer Journeys findings: the second most commonly broken journey across retail, grocery, hotel, insurance, car rental, and investment is finding and selecting the right product or service. A customer lands on your site, cannot navigate the product listing efficiently, cannot use the filters with a keyboard, cannot interpret the comparison table with a screen reader, and gives up. The CX report logs a broken journey but what it doesn’t log is that the interface excluded a portion of users by design.
I keep saying it. Design is not how it looks. Design is how it works!
The Deloitte study on customer service in Germany found that self-service via online channels frequently fails because information is either insufficient or difficult for customers to access. “Difficult to access” is an accessibility phrase. It ended up in a customer service report. Nobody noticed it was the same thing.
Show me your support process
When a company tells me they have tried everything and the escalation rate still does not budge, I am rarely puzzled. That unexplained residual almost always traces back to accessibility barriers somewhere in the self-service journey. And often it turns out that the fix is not even that dramatic.
A form that loses keyboard focus on submission. A modal that a screen reader cannot close. A filter that only works with a mouse. A help article that relies entirely on visual layout to convey structure, with no semantic heading hierarchy underneath. Contrast that is so low that older people (or people who are tired) can’t read it well. A chatbot that has never been tested with voice control. These are just a few examples. I have way more where these come from, I’ll be happy to discuss them with you.
Even after all this time, this gets to me. This is why I write snarky articles like this one. These are not exotic problems, and most of them are not expensive to fix, especially if you find them before the interface ships. The expensive part is the years of support escalations you accumulate while they sit there unaddressed and the CX reports that measure the cost without ever identifying the cause.
B2B is not exempt from this
B2B organizations tend to assume accessibility is a consumer-facing topic. The data, however, says otherwise.
The Qualtrics XM Institute State of B2B Customer Experience Management Report 2025 found that service and support handling is the most commonly broken customer journey in B2B, cited by 50% of respondents. It ranks above delivery and deployment, account relationship, and product quality. Only 14% of B2B CX practitioners can point to a specific monetary benefit from their CX program that their budget holders actually recognize.
So B2B organizations have a broken support journey, a CX program that cannot explain its own value, and no accessibility lens anywhere in the analysis. A procurement manager navigating a supplier portal with a wrist injury uses keyboard navigation. A buyer with low vision needs to read a product specification without relying on visual formatting alone. These are users in your support journey right now, generating escalations that are attributed to content gaps, process failures, or user error.
The price of getting this wrong
The Qualtrics XM Institute ROI of Customer Experience report 2025 found that after poor experiences, only 19% of German consumers intend to purchase more. That is the lowest repurchase intent of all 23 countries in the study. After excellent experiences, that figure rises to 56%. A factor of three.
That gap is exactly where CX investment is supposed to pay off. But if your CX program is diagnosing broken journeys without understanding that inaccessible interfaces are generating those broken journeys, you are putting effort into symptoms while the cause stays untouched. You can rewrite your help content, restructure your contact flow, and hire more agents. If the self-service interface still excludes a portion of your users, those users will keep escalating. Your support costs will keep climbing. And oh, what a surprise… your next CX report will find the same broken journeys it found last year.
Why this takes so long to reach the boardroom
People with a solid grounding in accessibility and universal design are not surprised by any of this. But I think it is worth saying something about why this connection has taken so long to reach the CX conversation, even if it does not make me universally popular.
A lot of the people who have been driving accessibility forward are motivated by exactly the right thing: the human experience, the dignity of it, the principle that nobody should be excluded. That is also what got me thinking about accessibility in the first place. But those people are often not in the rooms where the C-suite conversation happens. They are not the ones who can walk into a boardroom and say: you are losing hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, by offering inaccessible digital or physical experiences. The Click-Away Pound report from 2019 makes that cost painfully concrete, and I have written about it in detail.
The difficulty is that combining the social argument with the hard commercial argument feels uncomfortable to a lot of people. As if putting a price on inclusion somehow cheapens it. I do it explicitly, and I make no apology for that, because I think commerce and humanity are not actually in opposition here. If you go to a shop, a restaurant, or any place where you spend your money, and you feel ignored or excluded or like the space was not designed with you in mind, you do not come back. You tell your friends. You write the review. That is human behavior, and it shows up directly in churn rates, NPS scores, and support escalation costs. The data does not separate the human experience from the commercial consequence. Neither should we.
When you design for the full range of users, you produce interfaces that work better for everyone. An accessible form is a cleaner form. An accessible navigation structure is a clearer navigation structure. When you design for the edges, the middle improves. Don’t mistake that for a moral argument. It’s factually an engineering argument that shows up directly in your support costs and your repurchase rates.
The data has been pointing at this for years. The broken journeys are in your CX reports. The support escalation costs are in your finance system. The repurchase intent gap is in your NPS tracking. Accessibility is what connects all three. The only reason it has not appeared in the analysis is that nobody put it in the measurement model.
Don’t you agree with me that this is an expensive gap to carry? For most organizations, is not even that hard to close! Even improvements that seem very small lead to big results. I’m more than happy to consult you on that.
Sources: Gartner, Benchmarks to Assess Your Customer Service Costs, Qualtrics XM Institute, Consumer Trends Report 2024, Qualtrics XM Institute, Consumer Journeys Needing Improvement 2025, Qualtrics XM Institute, ROI of Customer Experience 2025, Qualtrics XM Institute, State of B2B CX Management 2025, Deloitte, Customer Service in Germany: The Underestimated Revenue Driver, Yext, Customer Service Study Germany 2023