Jobs / Customer support
Can agents do customer support work?
Help customers through chat, email, or phone while following company policy.
- US jobs
- 2,595,750 (1.7% of employment)
- Typical wage
- $45K a year (employment-weighted mean of occupation medians)
- Occupations
- 1 in O*NET 31.0
- Evidence
- 3 benchmarks from 3 institutions
Task level
Partial
Mixed. In the telecom domain of Sierra's τ²-bench, where the agent guides a simulated customer through a phone fix, the best agent succeeds on 97.8% of tasks on the first try and 92.1% on all four tries. On Salesforce's CRMArena-Pro, the best 2025 result is 58.3% in single-turn tasks and lower when a simulated customer holds back details.
Evidence: τ²-bench, CRMArena-Pro — by Salesforce AI Research and Sierra. Reading dated 23 Sep 2026.
Agents succeed on some scoped tasks. Reliable or end-to-end work is not shown.
Project level
Partial · thin evidence (fewer than 2 independent institutions)
Thin, adjacent evidence only. GDPval, which spans 44 occupations, is the one project-level benchmark in our collection mapped here. OpenAI reports that GPT-5.5's deliverables won or tied against professionals' work in 84.9% of comparisons across all GDPval occupations.
Evidence: GDPval — by OpenAI. Reading dated 23 Sep 2026.
Agents succeed on some scoped tasks. Reliable or end-to-end work is not shown.
Benchmarks for this work
Also relevant
These benchmarks cover part of this family's work.
Functions: CRM operationsCustomer serviceProfessional deliverables
What we do not know
- Benchmarks measure tasks, not whole jobs. A job is a bundle of tasks, judgment, and relationships.
- Capability is not adoption. A task that agents can do in a benchmark may still be done by people at work.
- Most results come from single runs. Reliability over many runs is often unknown.
Occupations in this family
Sorted by US employment (BLS OEWS May 2025). O*NET sub-occupations share the employment figure of their SOC group.
| Occupation | SOC | US jobs |
|---|---|---|
| Customer Service Representatives | 43-4051.00 | 2.6M |
How to cite
Credit the original work first: the benchmarks listed on this page, and their institutions.
Then, if you used this page:
Can Agents Work. "Can agents do customer support work?." https://canagentswork.com/jobs/customer-support/ (accessed 2026-09-24). CC BY 4.0.@misc{caw-jobs-customer-support,
title = {{Can agents do customer support work?}},
author = {{Can Agents Work}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://canagentswork.com/jobs/customer-support/}},
note = {Accessed 2026-09-24. CC BY 4.0}
}