Customer Experience in 2025: Priorities, Pressures, and What’s Next

To get a pulse on what’s driving CX strategies this year, we spoke to a diverse group of customer experience leaders across industries to find out why they’re betting on customer experience as their growth engine.

“There’s another side to this rough water… The companies who stay close to customers will grow, but those who don’t invest in customer experience now will be left behind when the tide turns.”

— Rick Snook, Director, Customer Experience

In part two of this series, we explore the following questions:

• What are CX leaders’ top priorities for 2025?
• What are the biggest concerns CX leaders have this year?

 

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From Reactive to Proactive: The Shift in CX Priorities

Across industries, CX leaders are doubling down on foundational excellence while exploring ways to deliver more emotionally resonant, tech-enabled experiences. The consensus? Get the basics right, then scale what works with intelligence and intention.

“It’s about simplifying tech while enabling future integrations — fewer Frankensteined solutions.”

— Winnie Chung, Director, Digital Platforms & Customer Experience, Tennis Canada

 

Top Priorities for 2025:

Mastering the Fundamentals

Leaders are working to improve and automate basic, routine touchpoints like appointment confirmations, billing updates, and service notifications to reduce friction and increase reliability. Two key principles guiding these efforts are simplicity and clarity. Examples include using plain language in forms and documents, providing AI-enabled summaries to make information easy to understand, and providing clear instructions about what actions the customer needs to take next.

“If we can’t get the basics right, we won’t earn the right to wow them later.”

Building Trust Through Engagement

Delivering engaging experiences is essential—not just visually impressive, but valuable to the customer. This means:

• Introducing new touchpoints that deliver proactive value
• Creating experiences that feel respect the customer’s time
• Strengthening trust through consistent and transparent interactions
• Gathering accurate, reliable customer data as a byproduct of well-designed experiences

What sets leaders apart is their ability to stay ahead—monitoring competitors, responding with timely solutions, and reassuring customers that they’re in capable hands.

“Customer experience is about connection — connecting physical, digital, and emotional touchpoints so the journey is seamless”

Intelligent Automation

Advanced organizations are increasingly using automation to cover the “table stakes” moments, freeing up human resources to focus on complex, high-emotion interactions—the ones that truly differentiate the brand. Customer-centric companies are taking a measured approach; seeking opportunities to deploy automation for touchpoints or processes that, at worst, do not diminish the experience, but at best, could make things faster and easier for customers.

A key principle for customer-centric implementation that CX leaders are following is to ensure that automation does not feel robotic. These leaders recognise customers want to feel valued and have humanizing experiences – not like a cog in a machine.

Personalization with Purpose

“Always-on” personalization is a key goal, aiming to build emotional connections with customers by delivering tailored experiences in real time—without crossing the line into intrusive or irrelevant.

In industries like financial services, leaders emphasize the added complexity of balancing personalization with stringent privacy expectations.

“Hyper-personalization without creepiness is the challenge of our time.”

— MD Klein, Co-founder, The Marketing Perspective

Closing the Feedback Loop

CX leaders are moving beyond passive listening to create active feedback loops designed to diagnose dissatisfaction and make real-time interventions to remedy experiences that might be going off track using tools such as sentiment analysis and instant micro-NPS surveys. This necessitates a mature tech stack, a profound understanding of customer needs and desires, as well as comprehensive journey mapping to design feedback loops tailored to each customer journey. Advancing these capabilities allows CX leaders to mitigate the risk of bad experiences, but also to recognise and reward loyal customers – and each were recognised as important focus areas for 2025.

Owning the Customer Insight

Advanced use of AI is helping organizations better understand customer needs, sentiment, and behavior. Many organizations are aiming to internalize this capability by reducing reliance on third parties and developing proprietary customer experience intelligence.

“It’s about being the centralized strategist — the person who connects product, tech, brand, and marketing — facilitating cross-functional collaboration”

— MD Klein, Co-founder, The Marketing Perspective

 

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The New Pressures: Talent, Tech Fatigue, and the Fight to Stand Out

While CX leaders are optimistic about the future, they are also navigating a set of stubborn challenges that require a careful balancing of customer needs, operational realities, and shifting market dynamics.

“Always be paranoid about your competition. What can they do better than you — and what can’t they do?”

 

Top Concerns Shaping CX Strategy in 2025:

Budget and Talent Retention

CX teams are expected to deliver more value—often with fewer resources. At the same time, retaining talent is increasingly difficult, both within CX teams and for the crucial front-line team members who are responsible for delivering the customer experience.

“It is increasingly difficult to retain quality frontline employees. The best ones advance quickly and want to move up in the organization, so we have to make sure we encourage advancement while ensuring we are investing heavily in training and development of new team members so we don’t let our standards drop for our customers.”

— Vice President, Claims Operations, National Insurance Company

AI Fatigue and the Battle for Attention

Automation and AI can be powerful tools—but they’re not always the experiences that humans want. Customers may encounter hundreds of AI-powered interactions each day, and brands risk becoming just another voice in the algorithmic crowd. A common theme heard was that CX leaders were often the ones fighting to lose sight of the “human element” of a brand’s interaction with its customers.

“Our brand is one of many customer journeys a person navigates in a day. We have to design experiences that cut through the noise and actually resonate. We won’t invest in AI just to be trendy — only if it improves the experience without losing the human touch.”

— Director, Customer Experience, National Sports Organisation

Standing Out in a Commoditized Landscape

In mature industries like financial services and telecom, true differentiation is difficult. Many CX leaders cited a growing sense of commoditization—where brand promises sound the same and customer expectations blur.

Reducing Friction, Not Adding Features

There is a clear shift from innovation for its own sake toward simplification, and customers increasingly value ease of doing business over novelty. CX leaders place emphasis on prioritizing:

• Streamlined journeys
• Fewer handoffs
• Clarity of communication and navigation

The Omni-Channel Imperative

Delivering a consistent, seamless experience across digital, physical, and hybrid environments remains a top concern. But doing so at scale—without sacrificing quality—is a complex operational challenge. Some key hurdles include:

• Outdated or fragmented technology infrastructure
• Inconsistent service levels across channels
• Maintaining human connection—especially as digital volume increases

“We’re rethinking our tech stack to ensure our stores, apps, and contact centers don’t feel like different companies. As a CX leader, you have to be the one who sees the whole picture and connects the dots.”

Scalability Without Sacrificing Humanity

Arguably the most difficult tension CX leaders face is scaling operations while maintaining the warmth, empathy, and personalization that customers crave. Technological advances make it possible to improve efficiency across a wide range of processes. The next wave of automation and AI agents will allow companies to scale these efficiencies even more broadly, but CX leaders are concerned that these tools may come at the cost of eroding the human relationships their organizations have with their customers. These leaders are working to ensure these powerful tools are implemented deliberately, with the customer in mind, so as to manage the risk of “losing your humanity”.

“The most challenging CX tensions we need to keep in mind for the future? Scalability and humanity.”

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Conclusion

If there’s one theme that unites the voices in this CX Leader Insights Series, it’s that customer experience is not a cost centre, it’s a growth engine.

Today’s CX leaders are not just reacting to problems or smoothing over customer issues. They are architects of long-term value, bringing the customer lens into product, brand, operations, and technology decisions. They’re also translators — turning data into insights, insights into action, and action into growth.

From simplifying core journeys to redefining how personalization and automation coexist, these leaders are balancing vision with pragmatism. Their north star? Earning trust, creating value, and building organizations that can scale without losing their human edge.

In our next installment, we’ll go deeper into the evolving role of the CX leader and how they’re influencing C-suite decisions, driving enterprise transformation, and shaping the future of customer loyalty.

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To learn more about Level5’s customer experience offering, check out the Experience section of our website, or contact Joseph Smith at jsmith@level5strategy.com.

Methodology Note:

Industries covered by these interviews include Technology, Financial Services, Insurance, Retail/Fashion, Sports, Telecommunications, and Professional Services.

Thank you to the CX Leaders who contributed to this article series, and a special thanks to the following contributors:

• Cadence Peckham, Customer Experience & Strategy
• Jen Cohen Crompton – President, Something Creative
• Kristy Mohun – Director, Customer Experience, Mejuri
• MD Klein – Co-Founder, The Marketing Perspective
• Rick Snook – Director and Independent Consultant, Customer Experience
• Winnie Chung – Director, Digital Platforms and Customer Experience, Tennis Canada
• Veronica Hernandez – Journey Manager & Experience Design, TELUS