Salesforce State of the Connected Customer — vendor-asserted: 57% say self-service "critical/very important"; 59% prefer self-service for simple questions; 88% say experience as important as products

Claim: Salesforce "State of the Connected Customer": 57% say it's critical/very important that companies offer self-service; 59% prefer self-service for simple questions; 88% say experience is as important as products.

Source: salesforce.com state-of-the-connected-customer PDFs.

Confidence: Single-source / Industry-consensus among vendor reports.

Caveat: Salesforce sells service software; numbers favour self-service adoption. Survey methodology details are not surfaced in the public materials.

Why this matters for Candid: Useful to recognise — clients will quote this number. The polite move is to set it alongside the behavioural Gartner numbers (Gartner (Aug 19, 2024; survey of 5,728 customers Dec 2023) — only 14% of customer service / support issues are fully resolved in self-service; even for "very simple" issues only 36% resolve fully) — stated preference and actual resolution are different things, and the gap is enormous.