One thing was clear at this year’s Customer Contact Week event in Las Vegas: AI has moved from the hypothetical to something that’s firmly rooted in contact center operations. Conversations revolved around balancing the human and tech elements now that AI is a coworker, not a concept.
Strong AI needs strong data
Agentic AI was everywhere, as companies shared their latest virtual agent solutions and discussed ways to incorporate action-based AI tools into the contact center. The common denominator was a solid data foundation. “Everyone has AI, and people want to do it now,” said Scott Rohrer of Hexaware Technologies. “But it depends on if the data is ready.”
“Everything starts with data,” added Dexter Brown, vice president of global customer delivery at Dell Technologies. “The more we can curate it, the better our agents will be.”
There’s more to AI than just tech
In these uncertain economic times, some brands are looking at AI solely to drive down costs. But that’s the wrong way to think of it, said Matthew Clare of Google AI.
“Cost cutting isn’t the best value proposition for AI,” he said. “The real business value is driving retention, loyalty, and improving CSAT.”
Korissa Singh of Ujet agreed. “Deflection and cost savings are still important but shouldn’t be the goal of AI investment.”
James Bednar, head of innovation at TTEC, encouraged CX leaders to rethink how they approach AI. “Manage your AI agents like your human agents, not an IT project,” he said.
Read more about CCW in our upcoming issue of the full Customer Strategist Journal, out next month.
CCW show report: Are you ready for your AI coworker?
AI insights redefine QA and boost CSAT
Traditional quality assurance (QA) tools have always had limitations. They typically capture less than 3% of interactions, which means there’s no way they can’t deliver a complete picture of customer sentiment, satisfaction, or what’s really happening in the contact center.
As consumer expectations rise, crafting a customer experience (CX) strategy around such a small sample size no longer makes sense. That’s where the dynamic duo of AI-powered insights and quality experts can help.
Suzi Sumango, executive director of quality insights and analytics at TTEC, and Gayathri Krishnamurthy, head of product marketing at Level AI, discussed the benefits of an AI-driven, expert-led CX strategy in the webinar, “AI masterclass: Moving the CSAT needle with CX insights.”
Analyze 100% of interactions with AI
Historically, brands have only gotten a small window into customer sentiment and CSAT. Standard QA tools analyze a very small share of interactions and rely on customers opting in to take surveys. This, Sumango said, produces skewed data; customers who choose to participate in surveys often are very happy following an interaction or very unhappy, so the results represent extremes.
With AI-powered tools like Level AI’s technology, brands get a complete picture of what’s happening in the contact center, during every interaction and across every channel. Conversational AI can listen to every interaction and provide data and analysis in nearly real-time (not the week or two lag time survey results typically take), Sumango said.
“In an AI world, you’re able to bring 100% of the conversations (into the fold),” said Krishnamurthy. Level AI’s “magic” is that it automatically mines conversations to pinpoint customer sentiment, she added. The result? Brands no longer have to guess how customers feel; they can know with certainty and adjust their CX accordingly.
What used to be a time-consuming and manual process of combing through interactions, mining data, and identifying trends and patterns, can now happen nearly instantly, she said.
Against this backdrop, contact centers are evolving into smart centers. They’re armed with insights and information that can reveal what delights customers, what frustrates them, potential obstacles, and best practices that should be replicated. AI can go beyond identifying what’s happening during interactions to uncover why things are happening.
“AI is really taking us to an unforeseen level,” Krishnamurthy said.
Experts elevate insights even further
AI-enhanced insights have tremendous potential to elevate CSAT and revolutionize CX, but only if brands have people who know how to put them into action, Krishnamurthy said.
Technology alone isn’t enough, Sumango agreed. Quality experts are a critical second layer, since they can transform insights into strategic next steps. By putting insights into context and taking other aspects, like a brand’s customer journey or culture, into account they ensure insights inform business decisions, associate training and coaching, and overall CX strategy.
TTEC Insights, our award-winning solution that blends Level AI’s technology with TTEC’s quality experts, has helped brands across various industries reduce handle time, improve first contact resolution, and elevate CSAT.
Insights that used to take quality experts months to mine are now served up within minutes via Level AI’s tools. As a result, experts can put those insights into action much more quickly.
“When we work together, it’s the art of the possible for all our clients,” Sumango said.
To hear the full conversation, check out our on-demand webinar, “AI masterclass: Moving the CSAT needle with CX insights.”
Webinar recap: AI + CX are the new revenue generation power duo
When it comes to revenue generation, every sale is important. The right sales strategy (and a team ready to put it into action) is critical to meeting business goals and driving ROI – but the sales landscape is evolving quickly.
AI-powered tools are giving sales teams more insights at their fingertips than they’ve ever had before. Using those insights to understand customers better, identify sales opportunities during service interactions, and improve associate coaching can help organizations drive revenue growth without sacrificing customer experience (CX) along the way.
Holden Olsen, TTEC’s vice president of global sales delivery, recently discussed why sales teams should harness the power of AI and CX with guest Seth Marrs, principal analyst at Forrester, during a LinkedIn Live event, “AI+CX: Secret weapons for sales success.”
Drive faster, better results with AI
AI is enabling sales teams to work smarter by helping them know their customers better; identifying the right times and ways to sell; and taking on time-consuming, menial tasks.
In a study, Forrester asked sellers how much time they spend on various aspects of their job – sales enablement, engagement, administrative work, and relationship management – and how AI benefits those areas.
“The biggest area where AI is making an impact is in enablement,” Marrs said. Forrester predicts more than 80% of the time sellers spend on enablement will be impacted by AI, as AI tools take on some of the menial and repetitive parts of the process. “We’re changing the way those things work or have worked in the past.”
With so many tools to choose from, it’s important that organizations explore which ones will help sellers the most and determine the best way to operationalize them, Olsen said.
AI-powered solutions can uncover behaviors that lead to seller success, so teams can replicate those behaviors team-wide. Conversational AI, for instance, can comb through sales interaction transcripts and pull out actionable insights to inform training and best practices, Olsen said.
Even AI tools that have existed for years hold exciting potential as sales teams take a fresh at them.
“There are so many ways that you can use that simplest form of AI in these new ways to really accelerate the results that you’re getting,” Olsen said.
AI can mine content, summarize information, prepare emails, and perform other tasks. On average, AI tools saved sellers an hour of time each week in 2024, compared with 2023, according to Marrs.
Uncover sales opportunities in service channels
Sales teams have long sought to maximize the value of every contact center interaction, but many have made the mistake of trying ill-timed sales attempts that feel forced and off-putting. AI can help here, too.
AI tools can ingest 30 days of call volume, for instance, and analyze interactions so teams truly understand customer intents, Olsen said. With those insights in hand, they can go intent-by-intent to build out a sales strategy that makes sense. In many cases, the sale can be part of a resolution.
“Customers are going to be willing to listen to you as long as they know that the questions you’re asking through the discovery phase are leading to the issue resolution, and that buys you the credibility to transition into a value-based offer.”
An informed, data-backed service-to-sales strategy can help brands drive revenue growth in the contact center while still delivering exceptional CX.
Make coaching more effective, efficient
Another way AI can improve CX is by informing associate coaching. When sellers succeed, conversational AI can listen to interactions and tell you why, Marrs noted.
Sales leaders can then use those learnings to inform coaching and replicate successful behaviors. AI takes the guesswork out of coaching, showing precisely what works during interactions (and what doesn’t). Certain tools can even give sellers real-time feedback during interactions.
A growing number of brands are using AI to drive coaching methodology and seeing quick results, Olsen said.
B2B CX – Strategy & Business Alignment
Posted as part of a partnership with the European Customer Experience Organization (ECXO) and Ricardo Saltz Gulko. Read full version here: https://ecxo.org/how-to-lead-a-b2b-cx-transformation-program-and-avoid-costly-mistakes/
Introduction
A successful Customer Experience (CX) transformation program must be deeply integrated with the business strategy of an organization. Many companies fail at CX transformation because they treat it as an isolated initiative rather than embedding it into their core strategic goals. To avoid this, CX leaders must demonstrate that enhancing customer experience is not just about satisfaction but about achieving tangible business results—such as increasing revenue, improving retention, reducing costs, and strengthening competitive differentiation.
For B2B companies, the complexity of sales cycles, long-term contracts, and multiple decision-makers makes it imperative to align CX strategy with overall business objectives. This means ensuring that every investment in CX improvement is linked to measurable business outcomes, gaining leadership buy-in, and ensuring every department contributes to a unified, customer-centric vision.
Why CX Needs to Be Aligned with Business Strategy
- CX directly impacts revenue – Companies with superior CX achieve higher customer lifetime value (CLV), lower churn, and increased cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
- Customer expectations are changing – Today’s B2B customers expect seamless interactions, self-service options, and personalized service just like in B2C.
- CX can be a competitive advantage – When products and pricing are similar, superior customer experience can be the differentiator that wins new business and retains existing clients.
- Operational efficiency improves – CX improvements often streamline processes, reducing customer support costs and inefficiencies across departments.
So, how can a B2B company practically align its CX transformation with business strategy? Below is a step-by-step approach.
10 Practical Steps to Align CX Strategy with Business Strategy
Step 1: Define a CX Vision That Directly Supports Business Goals
Before implementing any CX initiatives, clearly define what customer experience means for your company. This should be a North Star vision statement that aligns with business priorities.
🔹 Example: If your company’s business strategy is to expand into new markets, your CX vision might focus on creating a seamless onboarding experience for new customers in different geographies.
🔹 Action Point: Develop a CX vision that directly ties into financial and operational goals (e.g., reducing churn by 15%, improving customer retention by 10%, increasing customer effort score (CES) by 25%).
Step 2: Secure Executive Sponsorship with a Data-Driven Business Case
To get C-suite buy-in, CX leaders must speak in business terms—showing how CX improvements translate into profitability, revenue, and cost reduction.
🔹 Example: Use hard numbers—such as calculating the revenue impact of improving customer retention by just 5%—to make the case for investment in CX.
🔹 Action Point: Present CX metrics alongside financial indicators to show the business case for improving customer experience.
Step 3: Identify and Prioritize Key Customer Journeys That Drive Business Outcomes
Not all CX improvements will have the same impact on the business. Identify which customer touchpoints are most critical to revenue generation, retention, and operational efficiency.
🔹 Example: A SaaS company may find that improving the onboarding journey reduces churn, while a manufacturing firm might prioritize faster issue resolution in after-sales support.
🔹 Action Point: Use customer journey mapping to identify the highest-impact pain points, then prioritize fixing them.
Step 4: Link CX Metrics with Business KPIs
To ensure CX is seen as a strategic priority, integrate customer experience metrics into core business dashboards.
🔹 Example: Instead of only tracking Net Promoter Score (NPS), also measure:
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) – Measures total revenue potential per customer.
- Sales Conversion Rates – Tracks how improved CX increases deal closures.
- Customer Effort Score (CES) – Measures how easy it is for customers to interact with your company.
- First Response & Resolution Time – Shows service effectiveness and issue resolution.
🔹 Action Point: Develop a CX scorecard that combines customer experience data with financial KPIs.
Step 5: Build Cross-Functional Alignment and Collaboration
CX is not just a function of customer service—it spans marketing, sales, product, IT, and operations. To succeed, companies need to break down silos and create cross-functional collaboration.
🔹 Example: The sales team might promise seamless onboarding, but if the implementation team is overwhelmed, customers will face delays—causing dissatisfaction.
🔹 Action Point: Establish a cross-functional CX governance team that ensures alignment across all departments.
Step 6: Align Employee Incentives with CX Goals
To drive a customer-centric mindset, CX should be embedded into employee performance evaluations and incentives.
🔹 Example: If account managers are rewarded purely for new sales but not for customer retention, they may neglect existing customers, causing churn.
🔹 Action Point: Incorporate CX performance indicators into employee compensation structures across departments.
Step 7: Use Technology to Strengthen CX Strategy Execution
Technology enhances CX by providing deeper customer insights, streamlining interactions, and enabling automation.
🔹 Example: Implementing a Customer Data Platform (CDP) can consolidate insights from CRM, support tickets, and customer feedback, creating a 360-degree customer view.
🔹 Action Point: Ensure all CX-related technology investments align with overall business transformation objectives.
Step 8: Embed CX into Corporate Strategy Reviews & Planning
CX should not be treated as a separate initiative—it must be embedded into quarterly and annual business reviews.
🔹 Example: The CEO should review CX metrics in the same way they review financials, operations, and market expansion.
🔹 Action Point: Include CX discussions in leadership meetings and track CX progress in business strategy updates.
Step 9: Continuously Monitor & Improve CX Based on Data
CX strategy is not static—it should evolve based on customer feedback, competitive benchmarks, and emerging trends.
🔹 Example: A logistics company might use real-time customer feedback to improve delivery scheduling and shipment tracking.
🔹 Action Point: Create closed-loop feedback mechanisms where customer input directly influences strategy adjustments.
Step 10: Scale CX Improvements Globally While Adapting to Local Markets
For multinational B2B organizations, CX strategies need a global framework with localized execution.
🔹 Example: A tech company expanding to Asia might need localized customer support in different languages and time zones.
🔹 Action Point: Balance standardization with flexibility, ensuring global CX principles allow regional customization.
Conclusion
For CX transformation to drive business impact, it must be aligned with core strategic objectives. By integrating CX into leadership priorities, key performance metrics, cross-functional collaboration, and technology investments, companies can ensure CX becomes a driver of sustainable growth, not just an operational improvement.
Executives should embed CX thinking into every business decision, ensuring customer experience remains a top priority alongside financial and operational goals.
In Part 3, we will explore how culture and employee engagement play a pivotal role in sustaining a CX transformation—and how companies can build a truly customer-
Webinar recap: Fight fraud with richer data and human context
Businesses across every vertical — from retail to banking, healthcare to high tech and travel — might want to take a cue from fraudsters. In a word: Data.
Scammers have been very successful at account takeovers (up 56%) and chargebacks (up 78%) in the past year, thanks to the robust data sets they are exploiting. Business would do well to step up their game and expand how they source and mine data, according to two experts sharing fraud mitigation insights and strategies on the LinkedIn Live webinar, “Securing trust: Tackling digital payment fraud while elevating CX,” hosted by TTEC and moderated by 1to1 Media’s Elizabeth Glagowski.
“When we ingest more robust information, our reporting gets to be more robust” and that leads to better insights and proactive decision-making by leadership, said Alexander Hall, trust and safety architect at AI-powered fraud platform Sift.
Rich, multidimensional data
There is a fundamental evolution under way affecting how companies approach fraud mitigation, said Hall. AI and machine learning play a key role, but equally important is the ability to leverage richer data sets — from within and beyond an organization, across platforms, networks, and even “inferred” data to make predictions — all while leveraging human capacity to detect and interpret nuances in ways that machines just can’t.
Gone are the days of using rigid rules to prioritize case investigation, triangulating 10-15 signals, and spending weeks to review, escalate, and respond to suspected fraud, said Philip Say, vice president, solutions and product management, TTEC.
“Now, one individual can process 20,000 signals almost instantaneously, triangulated against many factors, to produce a real-time rule score that’s transparent to upper levels of management,” he said. “It’s just night and day. We’ve gone lightspeed ahead with these types of capabilities.”
Context key for the right outcomes
The crux of the challenge, Say added, is balance: How to introduce fraud techniques without adding friction that harms the experience and alienates customers. It’s here that context comes into play.
“Humans are really great at determining context over machines. We have a great ability to identify anomalies,” he explained. “Machine learning can repeat the recognition of those anomalies but they are not really good at understanding context.”
For example, a human can understand that some high-value customers travel across the globe with great frequency and their patterns of transactions, while analogous, are if fact, legitimate, whereas an algorithm might generate false positives that flag these same transactions as suspected fraud.
“Good leaders, good managers can understand and can coach their teams to recognize these nuances,” Say said. “All these AI and ML tools can help our productivity, but we need to balance that with operational discipline and experience.”
Hall agreed: “There’s always going to be a human element to fraud prevention, no matter how much automation there is, no matter how much technology we’re leveraging.”
Say added that some executives view fraud management as a “set it and forget it” proposition, when in fact, the opposite is true: “The good news is you can get a lot of leverage from a very small team — but that team has to be empowered to do the right things.
“It’s no longer task-oriented style of work but more high-level decisioning, pattern recognition, interpretation, and anticipating where the business is growing and evolving. The good news is the industry has caught up, but the organizational models have to catch up, as well.”
Validate, verify, identify
Whenever rolling out something new — a digital form for customers to complete, a new buy-now-pay-later payment option, or a new app — anticipate that fraudsters will discover and target these customer-facing touchpoints.
Hall said it’s essential to validate newly created accounts, but that’s not enough. It’s crucial to go further, to verify that account creators are whom they claim to be. This is where device intelligence uses geolocation to flag suspicious activity, synthetic credentials, and bots used in account takeovers (ATOs).
Next: Identify, he said.
Companies need to analyze how users interact with their platforms to identify and understand what constitutes behavior of legitimate customers versus fraudulent behavior. This third step to identify good and bad behavior is what enables leaders to make informed decisions about workflows for handling activity that sends up a yellow, orange, or red flag.
“There’s a saying in fraud prevention that goes, ‘If you haven’t seen it, you haven’t seen it…yet,’ ” Hall said. “If a particular platform hasn’t seen it yet, the platform up the street has.” That’s the value of expanding data analysis beyond just transactions and accounts.
“We’re seeing social engineering of the consumer, of the platform, and employees of the platform pick up,” he said.
“We’re seeing all these very different, very expansive fraud methods taking off across the network. By plugging into cross-platform, data-sharing networks, we’re going to be able to proactively see [a threat] before it hits our platform. There’s tremendous value in sharing data across platforms.”
For more color and commentary from Hall and Say, watch the full event on-demand, “Securing trust: Tackling digital payment fraud while elevating CX.”
2025: The year of autonomous AI agents
Of the 5 CX trends highlighted by TTEC in its CX trends report, the emergence of autonomous AI agents signals what could be the biggest innovation in the customer experience space in the next year.
“This is the year of generative. Next year is the year of agents,” said Jeremy Schowalter of Salesforce.com at a recent event centered around the technology. He echoed predictions from Gartner, Forrester, Everest, and other researchers banking on “agentic AI” as a significant milestone in the AI evolution.
Agentic AI is designed to conduct more complex actions than machine learning or generative AI, with minimal human supervision. Given the right data, it knows your business, plans and reasons, takes action, and scales for deep personalization. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, compared to less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously.
Early adoption is found most in sales and marketing, customer support, and HR functions, according to Everest Group. Many tech companies are vying for dominance in developing AI agent platforms. Not surprisingly, hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft have taken an early lead, but the field is growing rapidly (see Everest’s map and analysis).
Say hi to Sophie from Saks
What exactly do AI agents do? Let’s review examples from the recent Salesforce conference I attended:
In luxury retail, AI agents can recognize photos, understand text, and make customer recommendations that are personal and authentic, said Saks Global CEO Marc Metrick in a video shared at the conference. AI agents can share their insight with human contact center associates or directly with the customer. “Humans with agents drive customer success together,” he added in the video.
Patrick Stokes, executive vice president of product and industries marketing at Salesforce, put the concept to the test with a demo of Saks’ AI assistant Sophie. Through a natural phone conversation, Sophie identified Stokes as the caller, knew he had just purchased a shirt, and listened to his request to exchange it. She recommended a larger size and offered to make the exchange with a specific delivery window to his address. When he declined because of the shipping time, she identified his calling location and suggested a local store to pick up the new item within three hours. He accepted and completed the interaction, all in under one minute.
Of course this was a pre-planned demo, but it illustrated the aspiration of CX leaders to use AI to further simplify interactions and integrate data to solve customer challenges more easily.
Banking bets on AI agents
The technology has implications across nearly all industries. Olivia Boles, assistant vice president of solution architecture at Pentagon Federal (PenFed) Credit Union, presented that she’s working with Salesforce AI agents to nurture marketing launches, provide customer support assistance, and create sales plans. It also helps maintain compliance and prepare for regulatory changes.
“Breathtaking” is how she described the AI technology. “It’s a strange word to use about tech, but that’s where we’re at,” she said.
In the tech world, Vivint home security already had award-winning customer support and wanted to see what’s next, said Eddie Prignano, CRM platform director. The company created pilots for some of its most complex product troubleshooting service tasks.
“As a customer, I don’t want to wait on the phone for 20 minutes when an Agentforce agent can do it right away,” he explained of why the company launched its AI agent program. Now, the AI agents connect to Vivint’s Internet of Things (IoT) device data to identify product issues. For example, if a customer calls to say their security camera isn’t working, it can determine which device has an error and refresh it.
The interaction happens in seconds or minutes, rather than a typical human interaction where the associate waits for the customer to find and reboot the device, Prignano said. “We can spend most of our time delivering business value to customers.”
AI agents need data clarity to succeed
For AI agents to reach their potential, they need to connect to multiple data systems. The bots are programmed to move beyond large language models (LLMs) to connect to internal systems including CRM, ERP, inventory, point-of-sale, and others to find information and complete actions using retrieval augmented generation (RAG). In many companies, these systems are “islands of disconnected data,” according to Sanjna Parulekar, Salesforce vice president of product marketing. Some data may not be even digitized, and security issues remain top of mind.
Data accuracy, availability, and secure integration lead to more powerful AI agents completing more complex tasks for your business. Yet many companies still struggle with data — a recent AI survey from S&P Global Market Intelligence and Weka found that the biggest AI infrastructure challenge is data storage and management, well ahead of computing, security, and network challenges. That’s why many experts recommend working with partners to deploy and maintain AI agents, rather than building them from scratch.
What will AI agents look like in 2025?
2025 looks to be another banner year for AI. Will AI agents fulfill their promise to significantly improve the customer experience? Are we truly in another wave of AI evolution, after predictive and generative?
That’s the goal, said Salesforce CTO Parker Harris at the conference. “We all want to get to the world of AI customer success.”
NRF show report: Retail’s future is built on data
With more technology and insights at their fingertips than ever before, retailers are diving into their data to learn more about customers so they can deliver better, more personalized shopping experiences.
Harnessing the power of AI-generated insights, offering hyper-personalized customer experiences (CX), and tapping into the buying power of Gen Z were key themes at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show this month in New York City.
There was little discussion about AI as a technology at the event, which marked a change from recent years. By now, many retailers have integrated AI into their CX and don’t need to hear about its many benefits; they’re already witnessing them first-hand.
Instead, conversations focused on how brands are using AI and putting its insights to work. And some were already looking beyond AI and trying to gauge what the next “big thing” in retail technology might be.
Technology as a tool, not an endgame
Personalization was a hot topic at NRF as customers expect shopping experiences to feel tailored to their unique needs. Many companies spoke about harnessing the power of data to better understand customers’ habits and preferences. AI is playing a key role in efforts, but retailers said tech alone won’t drive the results they need.
“Technology is not the solution,” said Martin Urrutia, head of global retail experience and innovation at The LEGO Group. “When it’s used in the right way, it will only amplify what we’re doing [elsewhere].”
Technology will never replace the human interaction shoppers crave in certain moments, he said.
Ikea Chief Sustainability Officer Javier Quinones agreed, saying the home furnishings retailer is “extremely cautious” when exploring AI and other emerging tech. “Technology is not there to substitute; it’s there to support.”
When choosing when and where to adopt new technologies, brands should focus on how they can improve the customer journey and meet business goals, said Trang To, vice president of omni at Tapestry, which owns luxury fashion brands including Coach and Kate Spade.
“The way we think about AI is really enabling and accelerating our strategies,” she said.
Data is the name of the game
While AI wasn’t mentioned by name as much as it had been in previous years, conversations about data and insights were everywhere.
Customers are willing to share data about themselves if they think it will improve their shopping experiences, said Olivia Kwon Best, general manager of Adobe’s digital strategy group. Adobe works with retailers, including Ulta Beauty, to use data-driven insights to guide decision making.
Ulta’s loyalty program is 44 million members strong, with 95% of purchases made through the program, said Josh Friedman, vice president of digital products for Ulta. The program’s success gives the brand an incredibly clear picture of who its customers are, what they’re looking for, and how they prefer to shop, he said – which enables Ulta to serve up the right promotions and recommendations at the right times.
One challenge when it comes to collecting all this data, he said, is ensuring it can flow freely among the brand’s systems and platforms so shoppers have one unified experience and “all the touchpoints get harmonized.”
It’s easy to collect data during digital interactions but harder to quantify what’s resonating with shoppers in brick-and-mortar stores. In a panel discussion that asked what retail’s “next big tech gamechanger” will be, several retailers said they aim to improve in-store data gathering.
Ambient intelligence – which uses sensors, processors, and AI to create responsive environments – could be transformative for retail stores in the coming years, said Ellen Svanstrom, chief digital information officer at H&M.
She and others envisioned a future when a shopper could enter a store and ambient intelligence could identify the customer, quickly access her preferences and past purchases, and prompt store employees to deliver customized assistance or recommend certain items.
There’s huge untapped potential for brands to “leverage the same analytical rigor” in-store as they do in digital interactions, Tapestry’s To agreed.
In-store experiences move to the forefront
Even as many purchases are made online, some retailers are reinvesting in their brick-and-mortar stores – albeit differently than they have in the past.
LEGO’s Urrutia said the brand has been experimenting with livestreaming product demos from some stores, and adding in-store areas where customers can design their own mini-figures. There’s a new focus on incorporating “storytelling areas” in stores, he said, such as the world’s largest LEGO flower shop.
To make way for these experiential areas, he said, some stores have reduced the amount of inventory they carry. The goal is to make LEGO stores places where enthusiasts can come together to create and be inspired, he said.
Ikea also is rethinking some of its stores, Quinones said. The company, traditionally known for big-box locations averaging about 300,000 square feet, is experimenting with smaller store concepts in locations where it makes sense. Last year the company announced plans to open an 80,000-square-foot store on Fifth Avenue in New York.
Company leadership is making a more concerted effort to listen to the needs and desires of the individual communities where it plans stores, Quinones said.
Social selling becomes a priority
When NRF took place in mid-January, a U.S. ban of TikTok was imminent. But even without TikTok Shop in the picture domestically, social selling was top of mind for many brands – especially those looking to reach Millennial and Gen Z shoppers.
Social commerce is expected to nearly double between now and 2028, to $137 billion in retail sales, according to data presented by Emarketer. In 2025, 37% of U.S. consumers will make a purchase through social media, with an average spend of $820 per social buyer. Gen Z and Millennial shoppers comprise 71% of social buyers, said Emarketer Principal Analyst Sky Canaves.
“I don’t think that any brand can be relevant, especially to younger shoppers, if they’re not moving into the realm of social marketing,” said Linda Li, head of customer activation and marketing at H&M Americas.
A huge social selling success story out of Brazil has been footwear brand Havaianas. Its president, Fernando Rosa, said the company’s products can be found in 94% of Brazilian households – a trend he attributes largely to social selling. Brazilians spend more time on social media than most other populations, he said, so the channel has been essential to the company’s growth.
Founded in 1962, Havaianas has a long history, Rosa said, but it’s sales really began to skyrocket (with product launches repeatedly selling out with 48 hours) once it harnessed the power of social selling and working with influencers to market products.
2025 CX Trends: 5 ways customer experience ushers in a new era
This article was originally published in the Customer Strategist Journal. Read the issue here.
The customer experience (CX) landscape is constantly evolving with changing technologies, customer behaviors, challenges, and opportunities. That’s always been the case — but as we head into 2025, things feel different.
Now that AI has fully made the leap from theoretical buzzword to a cornerstone of contact center operations and brands are seeing its benefits firsthand, the year ahead is poised to be truly transformative.
Brands are equipped with incredibly powerful analytics and insights they’ve never had before, which brings exciting opportunities to revolutionize how they think about and deliver CX on a much broader scale.
As we head in 2025, here are 5 major trends that will reshape the way CX is delivered in the contact center.
1. CX sheds its borders
The CX world will keep expanding (literally) as more locations across the globe become hubs for CX excellence.
AI-powered tools like real-time translation, accent localization, and voice enhancement will empower brands to break down traditional barriers and deliver amazing customer support from anywhere in the world. With these technologies, associates and customers can communicate easily with each other, no matter where they’re located.
With borderless CX, brands can escape the confines that previously limited the contact center. Seize the opportunity to look at new geographies, technologies, and strategies that can transform your CX operation.
Amid this changing landscape, companies will increasingly seek to do business in regions where they can make a lasting social impact. Areas like South Africa, Rwanda, and others are poised to emerge as top CX destinations thanks to their highly skilled and digitally savvy workforces, robust infrastructure, competitive cost benefits, and impact opportunities.
2. Data insights break through barriers
Data’s role in CX will grow more crucial, so it’s important to have systems in place that allow data to flow seamlessly between brands and customers across all channels. Contact centers traditionally tend to be very segmented, but in 2025 those silos will start breaking down.
Insights will become more powerful, and AI will get even better at predicting the best methods for resolving customer issues based on behavior and sentiment. Real-time data, innovative AI analytics, and experts who can put those insights to work will be foundational to CX success in the coming year.
The term “omnichannel” has been part of the CX lexicon for years, but in 2025 advanced channel orchestration will begin to dominate the contact center landscape in ways it hasn’t before.
Use AI-enhanced quality and insights tools to listen to all interactions, across any channel, and identify trends, challenges, and opportunities. Then, layer on quality experts who know how to cull actionable insights from your data to truly transform the contact center.
3. AI agents make their mark on self service
With first-generation chatbots firmly in the rearview mirror, AI-powered autonomous “agents” are set to transform customer experience. They’re smarter, more predictive, and easier than ever to integrate into CX systems.
AI will evolve from supporting human associates during interactions to collaborating with them in real time – offering suggestions, context, and sentiment analysis as interactions are happening.
Not only will AI agents help make associates much more efficient, but they’ll also let customers become more self-sufficient. Customers will increasingly resolve their own issues on their own time, without an associate, as AI-powered tools become increasingly accurate and tailored to individual customer preferences.
As this trend unfolds, resist the urge to adopt technology simply for technology’s sake. Rather, make sure your AI strategy is always guided by your customer journey, and seek to solve the most pressing customer pain points first to make the biggest impact.
4. A new CX workforce emerges
One of the many byproducts of AI that will rapidly evolve is the role of contact center associates. With routine tasks taken off their hands by automation, in 2025 associates will need to be equipped to handle more complicated and nuanced interactions.
Brands will look for associates who possess different types of skills. Soft skills like empathy will take on new importance, and associates will need to be more technically proficient to work in tandem with AI-powered tools.
A new workforce means a new approach to learning. In 2025, employees will expect training and coaching to be experiential, tailored to their specific needs, take place in the channel of their choice, and be available on-demand.
Lean into AI to help revolutionize your associate onboarding, training, and coaching. AI-enhanced training tools let associates role play realistic customer scenarios and deliver real-time feedback to help improve performance. And AI can listen to 100% of customer interactions to help inform training and identify immediate coaching opportunities.
5. Value grows in your customer base
When brands focus solely on resolving the customer issue at hand, they could miss out on opportunities to grow loyalty and revenue.
In 2025 and beyond, brands will become better at harnessing the full value of every interaction. Digging into data and insights will help them integrate sales efforts into more customer touchpoints, understand the optimal amount of effort to put into each interaction, and gain deeper knowledge around individual customer value. Companies will be better equipped to identify and prioritize their most valuable customers.
AI should play a leading role in this, too. Use AI-enhanced insights and analytics to listen to interactions, incorporate service-to-sales opportunities, and identify customers who have more potential value. Dig into data to get the best sense of where there are opportunities to maximize value, then ensure associates are trained and ready to meet the moment.
Embrace the new CX era
As 2025 approaches, brands have unprecedented tools, insights, and capabilities at their disposal to reshape their customer experiences. It’s an exciting time to make a mark on contact center operations and strategy.
At the same time, CX increasingly lives at the intersection of the contact center, customer relationship management (CRM), and AI and analytics. So be sure to connect the dots among those three key components with a holistic CX tech stack.
To deliver seamless experiences in 2025 and beyond, brands must strike the right balance between humans and automation — and have a strong, customer-centric strategy in place to guide them.
Decoding the Feedback Dilemma: A Strategic Framework for Evaluating Customer Requests
By Ricardo Saltz Gulko
Guest article as part of our partnership with the European Customer Experience Organization. See original post here.
In the dynamic world of B2B customer experience, balancing responsiveness to feedback with long-term strategy can feel like walking a tightrope. Every feature request represents a signal—sometimes an isolated need, sometimes a broader trend—but responding to every demand can lead to resource strain, product dilution, and missed strategic opportunities.
The secret lies in transforming customer feedback into a structured decision-making framework. This ensures not only that your customers feel heard but also that your organization retains its strategic focus. Below is a deeper, more analytical take on the original framework, enhanced with actionable strategies and insights.
- Assess Strategic Alignment: The Backbone of Decision-Making
The first and most crucial filter for evaluating feedback is determining how well it aligns with your company’s strategic goals. A feature may seem promising in isolation but could detract from your long-term objectives.
Key Questions to Ask:
- Does this request support our core mission and value proposition?
- Will it enhance our competitive advantage or dilute it?
- Is this feature central to solving the most critical customer pain points identified in our strategic roadmap?
Framework for Analysis:
Use a strategic alignment matrix to classify requests based on their impact and feasibility. For example: - High impact, low feasibility: Requires prioritization but warrants resource adjustments.
- Low impact, high feasibility: Reassess against opportunity costs.
Analytical Challenge:
Strategic alignment is particularly difficult with high-value customers, whose influence can skew priorities. Misaligned decisions often manifest as scattered product features, eroding overall coherence.
Example:
Consider how SAP addresses feature requests. By adhering strictly to its ERP roadmap, SAP ensures every update fits its vision while solving broad customer pain points. A seemingly small UX improvement rolled out in Europe ultimately boosted satisfaction across industries.
- Broader Market Demand: Data-Driven Validation
While an individual request might reflect one customer’s unique need, assessing whether it signals a broader market demand is critical. This requires moving beyond anecdotal evidence into data-driven territory.
Action Steps:
- Conduct customer cohort analysis: Identify patterns across demographics and verticals.
- Use quantitative tools: Leverage surveys, CRM data, and market analytics to determine whether a request is a widespread need.
Challenges:
Vocal customers often overshadow silent majority preferences. Chasing niche demands risks alienating your broader user base.
Example:
When Salesforce received requests for deeper CRM integration, it didn’t simply respond to the enterprise client asking for it. Instead, it studied data from multiple sectors, realizing that an API enhancement would benefit its global customer base. The result: a scalable solution that strengthened Salesforce’s ecosystem.
Join ECXO.org, the only open-access CX professional network connecting practitioners, leaders, companies and executives to shape the future of customer experience! Become a member or learn more here: https://ecxo.org/
- Technical Feasibility: Beyond the Surface Complexity
Understanding the technical feasibility of a feature requires collaboration across teams. Even a seemingly simple request can mask hidden complexities that strain infrastructure or delay critical updates.
Steps to Evaluate Feasibility:
- Engage R&D, engineering, and operations teams early to map out potential challenges.
- Calculate the development cost-to-value ratio: Compare estimated hours against the potential benefits of the feature.
- Prioritize technical debt avoidance: Features that complicate future scalability should be deprioritized.
Insights:
Feasibility isn’t just about engineering effort—it’s about whether implementation will introduce inefficiencies or misalignments with your technology stack.
Example:
Siemens rejected an overly complex analytics request that required re-architecting their IoT platform. Instead, they developed a modular analytics solution, balancing feasibility with market relevance.
- ROI Analysis: Calculating Value Beyond Costs
A feature’s return on investment is not limited to direct financial gains. It encompasses customer retention, market competitiveness, and operational efficiency.
ROI Indicators to Measure:
- Will the feature reduce churn or attract new customers?
- Can it create cross-sell or upsell opportunities?
- Does it reduce the total cost of ownership for your clients?
Challenges:
ROI is inherently speculative, especially for innovative features. A clear hypothesis supported by test cases can mitigate risks.
Example:
Hitachi’s decision to invest in modular IoT analytics was backed by pilot tests in industrial automation. These tests confirmed broader applicability, justifying the investment.
- Scalability as a Differentiator
Scalable features amplify returns by serving a broad customer base rather than individual clients. They minimize maintenance costs and strengthen product consistency.
Key Considerations:
- Can the feature be modularization to fit different customer needs?
- Will it simplify or complicate your overall product ecosystem?
Example:
Samsung SDS developed enhanced cloud security protocols after identifying overlapping demands across several industries. By deploying a scalable solution, they ensured that resources were utilized efficiently.
- Resource Management: Balancing Ambition with Reality
Even strategically sound and feasible features can fail without adequate resources. Teams must evaluate whether they can support the project without sacrificing existing priorities.
Resource Allocation Model:
- Fixed vs. variable resources: Determine whether additional budgets or temporary staffing can address resource shortages.
- Phased development: Deliver the feature incrementally, ensuring manageable workloads while demonstrating progress.
Example:
When Siemens faced resource constraints, it scheduled their IoT updates in phases, ensuring timely delivery without disrupting other projects.
- Urgency Evaluation: Separating Critical from Cosmetic
Urgency often pushes companies to prioritize features that may not align with strategy. While time-sensitive requests can be important, they must be weighed against other factors.
Actionable Insights:
- Assign urgency scores: Rank features based on their potential to capture time-limited opportunities.
- Evaluate market timing: Certain trends justify expedited action, but others may fade before completion.
- Transparent Customer Communication: Building Trust
Communicating decisions effectively—whether a request is approved or declined—is essential for preserving trust. The rationale must be clear, rooted in data, and delivered empathetically.
Best Practices:
- Use data-driven explanations to validate your decision.
- Provide timelines for accepted features and propose alternative solutions for declined ones.
Example:
Salesforce’s structured communication templates allow their teams to manage customer expectations effectively, often proposing alternative workflows or near-term updates.
Conclusion: Transforming Feedback into Strategic Action
Customer feedback represents both opportunities and challenges. To act wisely, businesses must adopt a robust, analytical approach that balances responsiveness with foresight. By evaluating requests through a structured lens—assessing alignment, feasibility, market demand, and scalability—companies can ensure that every decision strengthens their competitive edge.
Feature requests are not just data points; they’re stepping stones to innovation. The art lies in knowing when to act and when to say no, always guided by strategy, scalability, and vision.
Join ECXO.org, the only open-access CX professional network connecting practitioners, leaders, companies and executives to shape the future of customer experience! Become a member or learn more here: https://ecxo.org/
CCMA report: Data analytics reinvents the contact center, starting with the front line
“With great power comes great responsibility.” That proverb may be traced to Voltaire and Spider-Man, but it’s contact center leaders who see the impact data and analytics are already having on the front line — and the obligations that come with it.
Forward-thinking leaders who prioritize the customer experience across a wide range of business sectors shared their insights, experiences, and some cautionary tales with CCMA earlier this year. The resulting new report, “Bringing the power of data and analytics to the front line,” captures best practices for leveraging data analytics to transform the contact center.
Particularly noteworthy is the consensus among CX leaders that contact center associates’ role cannot be overstated. Powerful tools hold great potential for frontline associates to improve the experience but add risk if not carefully thought through and delegated to the appropriate frontline and leadership roles.
The report’s respondents represent an array of business sectors, from banking and financial services to technology, transportation, insurance, hospitality, travel, entertainment, retail, and the public sector. Despite the diversity, the findings led to five discoveries relevant to all business verticals heading into 2025.
The five discoveries highlighted in the CCMA report are centered around responsible and ethical deployment of data analytics — where it can yield the greatest benefits while resisting temptation to overreach into unproven use cases.
Empower associates with dynamic dashboards
Frontline associates are not merely cogs in a wheel; they are eager to track achievements. Accessing their own KPIs through personal dashboards provides the visibility they seek — in real time. It’s imperative that the interpretation of data, however, is left to leaders, not front-line workers, survey respondents emphasized.
“When you use lagging metrics at the end of the month, it’s very hard for agents to truly understand what drives the score. Now you can have agents self-correcting,” said Peter Tubb, head of Global Trading Services, IG Group.
Associates welcome real-time feedback, said Daniel Nield, head of bike operations and live chat at insurance broker Atlanta Group. “People want to know their quality scores without waiting for their coaching session or scheduled update. ‘What do I need to work on?’ They can use that data to start eliciting conversations with their peers and with their managers, whereas at the moment it’s very one-way.”
Keep contact center KPIs simple
Information overload is a very real risk when leveraging data and analytics. CX leaders need to be selective about which KPIs to share with frontline associates. Too much data can be head-spinning and put focus on the wrong areas. When leaders correctly interpret an associate’s KPIs, they can coach that individual in meaningful ways that lead to an improved experience for customers.
“Make it simple and make it short. Not having to look at many different numbers to get to what you need to know. Surface the things that are important,” said Nick Coleman, senior manager of customer care at Dunelm, a home furnishings retailer.
One report participant recalled the data overload he confronted: “My teams were presented with every data element they could possibly have: Case file closures, AHT, call answer rates — whatever you could think of. It drove a focus on the numbers, not service,” said Luke Squires, operations director, Sykes Holiday Cottages. Reprioritizing KPIs — an 18-month process — made service quality associates’ responsibility while management was accountable for service levels. As a result, NPS rose to the 70s while CSAT and answer rates broke records at the vacation rentals company.
Use speech analytics to inform training, strategy
Speech analytics are low-hanging fruit too juicy to resist, and no industry vertical is priced out. With large language models (LLMs) to analyze contact center conversations, organizations get an early warning system that flags emerging issues before they snowball, identifies at-risk customers before they’re lost for good, and highlights types of interactions that require skillful handling and perhaps extra training.
“We’ve been able to understand a lot more in the short time that we’ve had speech-to-text,” said Sharon Oley, customer services director at software company Sage Group. “If a customer is showing some signs of dissatisfaction and potentially going to leave us, we’re able to then delve into those calls or chats and understand why.”
The Very Group, an online retailer and financial services provider, leverages speech analytics to better understand difficult topics that warrant extra time to handle with empathy. The system also cues associates to take a break after a taxing, emotionally charged interaction.
“We can go to our agents who are our best performers on certain topics and say, ‘What are you doing differently?’ That means you can give great outcomes to the customers and reduce AHT for these particular topics. And we can inform our training teams who onboard new agents to focus on these difficult topics,” said Luke Ollerhead, senior insight manager, The Very Group.
Speech analytics enables Atlanta Group to be proactive. “Now, if we see a surge in customers stating something, it’s automatically flagged so we can start analyzing and fixing at it straight away,” said Nield.
Deliver better, faster resolutions with AI-powered knowledgebases
Wide variance in how organizations leverage — or don’t use — knowledgebases defies logic. AI-driven tools like agent assist have proven their value interpreting and anticipating customer needs and serving up the right answers for faster resolution.
Agent assist prompts contact center associates as to what they might do next, depending on what the customer is saying, said Nicola Mayers, senior customer contact manager at railway Network Rail Ltd.
“About 80% of your calls will be memorable from an agent’s perspective in terms of providing the right answer. But it’s the 20% that you can’t remember that are really important,” said Michael Sherwood, head of brand and experience, Atom Bank. It’s that 20% of interactions that tend to be more complex and merit more time to deliver quality CX.
“Our knowledgebase also captures the reason for contact. You can see the top reasons for customers ringing in,” Sherwood added.
Embrace the changes technology brings
The final, perhaps most compelling discovery unearthed by CCMA’s report is not just how the role of associates is changing but how the contact center is being reinvented.
“You have to be prepared for the job role and the skill sets to fundamentally change,” said Dunelm’s Coleman. “If I’ve employed people in the past to click buttons and follow processes, but now I’m asking them to deliver what the machine has generated rather than generate it themselves, I’m now employing communications people — not people who follow process maps.”
Report participants recognize that change is not easy. Implementations can fail. Resistance to new technology, processes, and roles is to be expected. Concerns about jobs lost to AI and automation is very real. That means contact center leaders are obligated to reassure and educate.
“We have to take away the fear that the technology is going to replace people,” said Joe Burke, former vice president partner and customer care, Go City, a travel company. “It will shift people toward value-added tasks, things that the bot or an AI engine can’t do very well, for example conversations requiring empathy, highly complex, or emergency situations.”