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Omnichannel has been one of the most celebrated ideas in customer experience - seamless journeys … connected channels … customers moving effortlessly from chat to phone to email … it sounds great on stage and in slide decks. But customers tell a different story.
When we surveyed 600 U.S. consumers in October 2025, one message came through loud and clear: omnichannel may be everywhere in strategy, but it’s still missing in practice.
What customers experience instead is something else entirely: Omnichannel theater.
The illusion of seamless journeys
Most organizations technically offer multiple channels: chat, email, phone, social, portals. That’s not the problem. The problem is what happens between them.
Our survey revealed that when customers switch channels:
- 44% almost always have to repeat themselves
- 49% sometimes have to repeat themselves
- Only 7% rarely or never do
That means 93% of customers experience some level of context loss when moving between channels. From the customer’s perspective, every handoff feels like starting over.
Omnichannel exists. Continuity does not.
Why omnichannel breaks down
Omnichannel theater happens when channels are connected operationally but not experientially. Systems don’t share full context, tickets don’t carry history, and AI summaries don’t follow the customer. Instead, each channel resets the conversation.
Smart Communications’ 2025 CX benchmark reinforces this reality, finding that fragmented omnichannel experiences are among the top customer complaints. And two-thirds of consumers say they would drop a brand due to poor communication.
Our survey data explains why: Customers don’t want more channels - they want fewer restarts.
The repeat loop problem
We asked customers a simple question:
“What’s one thing a company could change to make customer support less frustrating?”
The answers were consistent:
“Making sure I don’t have to repeat myself.”
“Ensuring that I do not have to constantly repeat myself.”
“Seems like they always put you into an endless loop.”
“Not having to repeat my problem every time my issue changes hands from one representative to another.”
This repetition tells customers:
- The company isn’t listening
- The system doesn’t remember them
- Their time doesn’t matter
No amount of channel choice can compensate for that feeling.
Why AI hasn’t fixed omnichannel yet
AI was supposed to solve this problem with summaries, context transfer, and intelligent routing.
In reality, many AI systems operate inside individual channels instead of across them. Context gets summarized locally, then lost globally. Customers still have to re-explain, re-authenticate, and re-escalate.
That’s why omnichannel frustration persists even as AI adoption accelerates. Technology alone doesn’t create continuity - design does.
What real omnichannel looks like in 2026
The organizations getting omnichannel right are focusing on omnicontext, not omnipresence.
That means:
- Full conversation history follows the customer
- Intent and sentiment travel across channels
- Unresolved issues surface automatically
- Agents see the entire story, not just the last message
When a customer moves from chat to phone, the conversation continues. No recaps. No resets. No loops. Just one seamless, connected experience.
Download the full 2026 trends report
This article draws from Glance’s Customer Experience 2026 Trends Report, based on a survey of 600 U.S. consumers.
The full report explores:
- Why omnichannel breaks down in real life
- How context loss drives frustration and churn
- What customers actually expect from connected experiences
- How leading brands are shifting from channels to continuity
Download the full report to see the data and insights shaping CX in 2026.
Omnichannel theater refers to experiences that appear seamless in strategy but feel fragmented to customers due to lost context and repeated handoffs.
Because systems often don’t share full history, intent, or sentiment across platforms. Each channel resets the conversation instead of continuing it.
Very common. Our survey found that 93% of customers sometimes or almost always have to repeat themselves when switching support channels.
Not necessarily. Customers want continuity, not choice overload. More channels without shared context increase frustration.
AI can help summarize and route interactions, but when deployed in silos, it often fails to preserve context across channels.
They should focus on omnicontext: unified history, intent, and unresolved issues that follow the customer across every interaction.
All statistics cited come from Glance’s Customer Support Survey of 600 U.S. consumers conducted in October 2025, featured in the 2026 trends report.
