2024 was a rollercoaster for the customer service world – with AI not just improving but completely shaking up the CX landscape.
But despite all that tech innovation, UK customer satisfaction has plummeted to its lowest point in 14 years. Ouch!
Don’t panic – there’s still time to turn things around, and we’re here to help you hit the ground running in 2025 with 5 game-changing CX trends.
Why should better CX be our New Year’s resolution?
This year, 89% of companies will compete primarily on CX… so keeping up is an absolute must. Here are some more major reasons:
- Better ROI: Companies that invest in great CX aren’t just getting gold stars – they’re outpacing their competition by 5x in stock performance. Ka-ching! 💰
- Rising Expectations: For 88% of customers, the experience is just as important as the product or service itself. Once they have an amazing experience with one brand, they expect nothing less. It’s called ‘expectation transfer,’ and it’s setting the bar higher for all of us.
- Hidden Costs: Here’s the kicker – service failures cost UK businesses a jaw-dropping £6.8 billion per month in lost time. Employees spend an average of 3.3 days a month dealing with complaints. That’s £81.6 billion a year. Yikes!
It’s no wonder 80% of businesses are planning to double down on CX investments in 2025. To stay ahead of the pack, we need to keep an eye on the latest CX trends and set up a strategy that’s ready for the future.
Trend 1: Seamless Experiences
‘Omnichannel’ isn’t just some buzzword we throw around any more – it’s the bare minimum. 75% of customers now expect a seamless experience across all touchpoints, no matter how they reach out.
When customers say they want seamless experiences, they mean they want smooth, hassle-free journeys. No more long holds, endless transfers, or hunting down solutions across multiple platforms.
Risk
- As a business grows, it’s easy for teams to become siloed – one team handles the IVR, another manages the website, and yet another deals with social media. This can create chaos if left unchecked.
Solution
- At Adexchange, we map out the customer journey from start to finish, ensuring smooth handoffs between every channel – from IVR to online chat to social media. So, customers can easily switch between platforms without missing a beat.
Trend 2: Changing KPIs
As AI evolves, it’s predicted that 80% of all enquiries will be resolved without the help of a human agent – but this doesn’t mean it can or should replace them. It’s time to look beyond just ‘how fast’ and start focusing on how well.
From virtual assistants to AI copilots, there are plenty of tools to automate simple processes and save agent time. But how do these tools impact customer experience and our business’ reputation?
As the face of customer service becomes digital, traditional efficiency-focused KPIs just aren’t cutting it anymore. Here’s what matters now:
- AI-Human Collaboration: How effectively are AI and human agents working together?
- Customer Satisfaction: Are chatbots delivering the goods or leaving customers frustrated?
- Complex Issue Resolution: Can AI handle the heavy lifting, or is a human needed for the tough stuff?
This means our key concern is making sure customers get the right answers quickly and easily, and come away feeling positive about the interaction. In short, three all-important digital KPIs are success, effort and emotion.
Risk
- As busy contact centre managers it’s tempting to fall back on ol’ reliable: measuring efficiency metrics such as deflection rates and AHT. While these are important, we also need to understand how our customers feel to measure how successful a journey is.
- Bogged down by data overload? Our blog on measuring customer journeys is a great place to start.
Solution
- We identify and integrate a balance of qualitative and quantitative metrics to track the full impact of automation, moving beyond simply tracking efficiency.
- This includes collecting valuable Voice of Customer (VoC) insights – to understand what customers actually want.
- We’ll then analyse this data and create an actionable plan to ensure the maximum ROI from our investments in automation.
Trend 3: Proactive & Personalised Engagement
In 2025, more organisations will shift from traditional reactive customer engagement, to proactive strategies – predicting customers’ needs and resolving issues before they even arise.
This outbound approach pairs brilliantly with personalisation, which has become essential in recent years: 73% of customers now expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, and are more likely to engage when they do.
Combining personalisation with a proactive approach creates endless opportunities: understanding accessibility needs, targeted cross-selling to boost sales, or identifying and retaining less loyal customers, to name a few.
Risk
- It’s tricky to gather meaningful insights from customers without feeling invasive – which leads nicely to our fourth CX trend.
Solution
- Develop a strategy to collect and use customer insights effectively. By responsibly using predictive data, we can ensure that every customer interaction feels personalised and thoughtful.
Trend 4: Privacy & Trust
Customer trust is one of the hottest CX trends right now.
92% of customers believe that companies often prioritise profits over protecting their data, which means they won’t be lining up to share it – even as they demand more personalised experiences.
It’s critical customers trust us with their data, so we can deliver the best CX.
Risks
- AI: Currently, only 28% of US adults trust information given by AI. Big brands like the City of New York and Air Canada have learned the hard way – when AI gets things wrong, trust takes a big hit.
- Personalisation: The more customer data we collect, the more personalised experiences we can offer – but this also increases the risk of identity theft and financial fraud. How do we walk this fine line?
Solutions
- At Adexchange, we specialise in designing and maintaining effective knowledge bases and virtual assistants to ensure customers can easily find accurate, up-to-date information.
- We advise on best practices to ensure privacy expectations are being met, and design customer journeys to let customers choose what data they’re willing to share – so they feel secure and in control.
Trend 5: Voice Technology
Nearly 3 in 5 consumers say they would be more likely to try a brand that uses voice tech in their customer service, citing speed, efficiency and convenience as the main selling points.
As technologies such as voice recognition, text to speech (TTS) and natural language processing (NLP) evolve, they’re on track to become an integral part of CX.
Risks
- The main challenge? Minimising errors. Voice technologies require thorough testing and tuning to understand diverse accents, tones, and languages to be truly effective – so may not be the quick fix they first appear to be.
- Customers won’t be happy if they aren’t understood, or if the voice they hear doesn’t sound like a human.
Solution
- To save you time, we can optimise your TTS voice by creating suitable content and tweaking it to ensure correct prosody (patterns of stress and intonation).
- We’re experts at mapping effective voice recognition IVR journeys such as ID&V, and know all the tricks to boost success rates.
Where do I start?
Resist the temptation to chase every shiny new trend. The key is to go back to basics –let the data be your guide.
When in doubt, why not give us a call? We’ve got the expertise to help you turn these CX trends into real, actionable strategies that’ll keep you ahead of the curve in 2025.
