Editorial
Research Report
Building the Case for Modern Public Sector Messaging
The Gist
- How much of the average martech stack goes unused? — Zylo's 2026 index found organizations leave 36% of software licenses unused, wasting an average of $19.8 million per year.
- Who actually controls CX software spend today? — Business units control 81% of software spend while IT manages just 15%, leaving stack governance effectively ownerless.
- What's the customer-facing cost of tool sprawl? — Salesforce research shows 55% of customers feel like they're dealing with separate departments, and 56% repeat information to different reps — the top customer frustration in the market.
Here is the paradox no vendor will put in a keynote: customer experience technology has never been more abundant, more intelligent, or more heavily funded — and customers have rarely felt less seen. The marketing technology landscape has grown roughly one-hundred-fold since 2011, from 150 tools to well over 15,000. Budgets followed.
Experiences did not.
Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Technology Survey calls it a quiet crisis: only 49% of tools in the stack are actively used, and just 15% of organizations qualify as high performers — meeting strategic goals with demonstrable ROI. Read those numbers together. Companies are buying more technology than ever, using half of it, and overwhelmingly failing to convert it into experience outcomes. More tools. Worse experiences. And, as we will see, a bill that floats between departments because nobody wants to sign for it.
The Million-Dollar Shelfware Problem: Features You Already Own and Never Switched On
Before requesting budget for the next platform, walk through the ones you already pay for. The speech and text analytics bundled into your contact center tier — unconfigured. The journey orchestration module that shipped with your marketing cloud — never mapped to a single journey. The predictive scoring sitting behind a toggle in your CRM. The knowledge-base AI included in your helpdesk plan that no one ever trained. The survey platform’s text analytics engine running on default settings since implementation. The customer data platform segments built once, for a campaign that ended two years ago.
None of this is hypothetical — it is the standard anatomy of an enterprise CX stack.
The cost is quantified. Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, built on more than 40 million licenses and $75 billion in spend under management, found organizations leave 36% of their software licenses unused — an average of $19.8 million in waste per organization, per year — while median software spend runs $9,455 per employee.
And the sprawl is accelerating, not correcting: AI-native application spend grew 393% year over year in large enterprises, frequently entering through employee expense reports before IT even knows it exists.
Call this what it is. Every license paid for but not well utilized — every dormant feature, functionality, even entire modules — is not merely waste. It is a silent liability: it renews automatically, compounds quietly with every contract cycle, inflates the organization’s perceived capability while delivering none of it and appears on no ledger where anyone is forced to confront it. Unlike visible debt, nobody reports it, nobody amortizes it, and nobody is fired for it — which is precisely why it grows.
Independent analysis points the same way: a data-driven review of martech complexity citing Deloitte found 44% of marketing stacks go completely underutilized — and concluded the problem is not that the tools lack power, but that organizations lack the integration, governance and proficiency to use them. The capability you are about to buy probably already exists in something you own.
Related Article: 6 Marketing Technology Trends to Watch in 2026
The Silent Tax on Every Customer Interaction
Sprawl is not only a finance problem. It is paid, interaction by interaction, by the people serving your customers. Harvard Business Review’s study of digital work tracked employees across Fortune 500 companies and found they toggle between applications roughly 1,200 times a day, spending nearly four hours a week just reorienting after switches — about 9% of their working year, lost to the seams between tools.
Why Fragmented Customer Data Undermines a Single Source of Truth
Every tool added to the stack captures its own sliver of the customer: the chatbot holds the conversation, the CRM holds the account, the survey platform holds the sentiment, the billing system holds the dispute. Fifty partial portraits — and no single truth. The customer, meanwhile, reasonably assumes they are dealing with one company.
Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer research measures the gap precisely: 79% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, yet 55% say it feels like communicating with separate departments rather than one company, and 56% routinely repeat or re-explain information to different representatives. Disconnected experiences rank as consumers’ number-one frustration with organizations. Note what that means: the top customer frustration in the market is not price, speed or product. It is the direct, customer-facing symptom of the fragmented stack.
This is the heart of the paradox. Each tool was purchased to improve some slice of the experience. Collectively, unintegrated, they manufacture the single experience customers hate most.
Who Owns CX Software Spend? The 81/15 Governance Gap
So who is accountable? Follow the money and you find a vacuum. Per the same Zylo benchmark, business units now control 81% of software spend while IT directly manages just 15% — meaning the stack is bought everywhere and governed nowhere. Marketing buys engagement tools, service buys deflection tools, sales buys revenue tools, digital buys journey tools. Each purchase is locally rational. The collective result — overlap, integration debt, license waste, fragmented customer data — appears on no one’s objectives.
CX leaders sit in the worst seat of all: accountable for the outcome, owning almost none of the tools that produce it. The CIO inherits the integration debt without the experience mandate. The CFO sees the renewals but not the redundancy. And the customer — repeating their story to a fourth representative — pays the only bill that cannot be deferred. Until one executive owns the stack as a system, with experience outcomes attached to it, the paradox is structural and self-renewing: every unsolved experience problem generates a proposal for one more tool.
How to Turn a Fragmented CX Stack Into a Governed System
The way out is not heroic procurement discipline or a purchasing freeze. It is converting a pile of tools into an architecture with an owner. That starts with an honest utilization audit — feature by feature, not license by license — against the customer journeys the stack is supposed to serve. It continues with consolidation where overlap is proven, activation where capability is dormant, and integration-first criteria for anything new: no tool enters the stack without a defined data contract with the systems already in it. And it requires a governance forum where CX, IT and finance see the same map: which tools, which features, which journeys, which cost, which outcome.
Key Takeaways: Fixing the CX Stack Paradox
The following table highlights the most important lessons, actions and strategic considerations emerging from why more martech spending is producing worse customer experiences.
| Key Area | What Happened | Why It Matters | Recommended Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shelfware waste | Organizations leave 36% of software licenses unused, wasting an average of $19.8 million per year (Zylo). | Unused licenses renew automatically and compound as a hidden cost with no owner forced to confront it. | Run a feature-level utilization audit against live customer journeys before approving any new purchase. |
| The toggle tax | Employees switch applications roughly 1,200 times a day, losing close to 9% of their working year (Harvard Business Review). | Every switch shows up to the customer as hold time, silence, or a divided agent. | Measure the number of applications an agent touches per contact and time the switches. |
| Fragmented customer data | 55% of customers feel like they're dealing with separate departments; 56% repeat information to different reps (Salesforce). | Disconnected experiences are the top customer frustration in the market — ahead of price or product. | Build one customer truth before layering in AI or personalization. |
| Governance vacuum | Business units control 81% of software spend while IT manages just 15% (Zylo). | The stack is bought everywhere and governed nowhere, leaving CX leaders accountable for outcomes they don't control. | Assign one accountable owner for the stack as a system, not a collection of point tools. |
| Renewal discipline | Tools currently renew by default rather than by proven journey impact. | Undefended renewals are how the sprawl reproduces itself year after year. | Tie every renewal to a specific experience outcome; let unproven tools defend their spend or exit. |
7 Moves for CX Leaders and the C-Suite in Charge of CX — and the Impact in B2B and B2C
None of this is theoretical. Working across several divisions of one of the principal companies among my major clients, we applied exactly this discipline — feature-level utilization audits against live customer journeys, activation before acquisition, and a single accountable owner for the stack — surfacing licensed capability that multiple divisions were about to purchase again, and converting silent liabilities back into working assets. The moves below were defined and refined in that engagement.
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They are written for the CX leader — or the C-suite executive in charge of the CX team:
- Run a feature-level utilization audit before any new purchase. Inventory what every platform in the stack can do versus what is switched on. Impact today: B2C teams routinely discover analytics and orchestration they are about to re-buy; B2B teams find CRM intelligence that sales requested last quarter — already licensed.
- Activate before you acquire. Make “why can’t an existing tool do this?” a mandatory gate in procurement. Impact today: organizations redirect budget from duplicate purchases to configuration and training — the cheapest CX improvement available, in B2B and B2C alike.
- Measure the toggle tax in your front line. Count the applications an agent touches to resolve one contact, and time the switches. Impact today: B2C contact center convert recovered seconds directly into shorter handle times; B2B support teams cut resolution cycles on complex, multi-system cases.
- Build one customer truth before adding any intelligence. AI on fragmented data industrializes inconsistency. Impact today: B2C brands stop personalising from contradictory profiles; B2B account teams stop walking into renewals blind to open service escalations.
- Give the stack a single accountable owner. One executive or team member, one map of tools-to-journeys, experience outcomes in their objectives. Impact today: the 81%/15% governance vacuum closes; renewals become portfolio decisions instead of departmental reflexes.
- Tie every renewal to an experience outcome. If a tool cannot be traced to a journey it improves, it defends its renewal or exits. Impact today: B2C stacks shrink while satisfaction holds or rises; B2B vendors face real scrutiny — and the savings fund the integration work that was never budgeted.
- Report stack health to the board as a CX metric. Utilization, integration coverage, cost per journey served. Impact today: technology sprawl becomes visible at the level where it can be stopped — and CX gains the financial language the boardroom actually hears.
The CX stack paradox will not be solved by the next tool, because the next tool is how the paradox reproduces itself. It will be solved by the unglamorous decision to own what you already bought — to activate it, integrate it, govern it, and retire what remains. Customers are not asking for more technology. They are asking, with remarkable patience, to stop repeating themselves.
The companies that hear that — and reorganize the stack around it — will deliver better experiences next year while spending less. That is the rarest sentence in CX. It happens to be true.
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