Where is CX going in 2025?

Wow. 2024 was tremendously fast moving in the world of CX, with many innovations, revelations, and disruptions. 

We’ve seen customer relationship management systems grow in capability and prominence. We’ve seen the use cases and understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) mature and evolve. And we’ve seen how AI can truly augment existing contact center strengths. 

These advances from the past year give us a strong foundation for anticipating what lies ahead for customer experience in 2025. These observations suggest that the CX industry is poised to learn from previous challenges and build on recent successes, ushering in a prosperous era for customer experience.

So, without further ado, here are my three predictions for customer experience in 2025.

1. CRM” gets a new identity and solidifies its place in CX delivery

CRM (customer relationship management) systems have long held the vision, and next year will take a big step forward, of uniting the customer journey. In the past, we treated CRM as a collection of separate, departmental applications. Augmented with AI, today’s CRMs are platforms prepared to fulfill the promise of orchestrating the entire customer journey, harnessing CX data to guide real-time actions and deep customer insights, and connecting an organization’s customer engagements with mid- and back-office fulfillment. 

So, why is the expansion of CRM remit a big deal? 

Customers expect to be known, helped, and valued throughout every interaction with a company. They expect a customer service representative to know their purchase history or a technical support agent to understand their past service issues. They expect marketing messages to be tailored to their shopping preferences and ultimately consumers want to interact with brands on their terms, when, where, and how they want.

Without the technology cohesion to stitch those data points and interactions together, a truly personalized end-to-end customer experience is nearly impossible. The new AI-powered breed of CRMs makes this advanced level of CX possible – and even extremely attainable. 

We predict that the ready availability of data and interaction connectivity will pave the way to a new CX goal that I’m terming, “experience fulfilment.” 

Today, the typical CX purview only covers customer facing interactions because that’s where our visibility ends. If a customer receives an incorrect order or a product has a defect, those are problems for mid- and back-office operations to solve. 

That disconnect – while typical – isn’t acceptable. CX is everyone’s problem to solve. With the new breed of CRM, we can improve visibility, increase automation, and create a cohesive ecosystem of data and collaboration, making it truly possible for everyone to fulfil the customer experience promise, whether in the awareness and purchase stage, or with service and loyalty.

2. AI-powered data management will (finally) unlock AI value realization

According to a 2024 report, 88% of surveyed companies said they are currently in the process of implementing AI or machine learning into their operations – yet only 25% of these companies say they are seeing revenue growth from their investments. ​

The issue? Data. 

AI needs both structured and unstructured data to work effectively, and that data needs to be vetted, accurate, up to date, and free from conflicts. Accessing structured data from transactional systems that carry out business processes comes with its challenges, usually stemming from technical debt and lack of API access for integrations.  However, using unstructured data (knowledge) is just as challenging, when you think about the massive amounts of knowledge in any given business – the spreadsheets, pdfs, voice and digital transcripts, policies and procedures, and SharePoint content accumulated over years or decades. 

If you were to use this existing data in a client facing interaction such as a chatbot, you’d be headed for disaster in the form of hallucinations, compliance violations, and conflicts. 

In 2025 we’re going to see AI-powered knowledge engineering and content intelligence take a huge leap forward. New tools are able to scan thousands of documents very quickly and identify where there are missing descriptions, contradictions, and even the probability that the content can be used by a bot – AI is notoriously bad with spreadsheets and tables for instance. These tools can then provide an assessment of the quality of the content as well as the risk that the content could cause a hallucination.

While 2024 was the year we saw just about every business exploring AI, 2025 will be the year businesses realize value from their AI investments – if they also leverage AI to get their data houses in order. 

3. Contact center technology will get AI upgrades but few major lift-and-shifts

In 2025, we likely won’t see a major shakeup in contact center technology environments. Without a compelling market event like federal legislation or an end-of-life announcement, we’re not anticipating a great deal of full environment replacements. 

We do see companies being more interested in exploring new tools – particularly AI tools – and wrapping these tools around their existing environments to do more integrations rather than a full lift-and-shift. 

Companies also aren’t necessarily bought into a homogenized CX ecosystem. They want to be able to choose the best platform for their omnichannel interactions and possibly a different platform to power their AI layer, which may consist of virtual agents, agent assist and coaching, summarization, and more. And they want all of these functions tightly integrated into the omnichannel engine. 

Of course, migrations from premise to cloud and other transitions are still happening, but more and more we’re seeing leaders take a pause and evaluate what outcomes they’re trying to drive before embarking on a major change. 

Finally, we can’t forget about the hyperscalers. AWS, Microsoft, and Google will all continue to grow their footprints within the contact center space as the boundaries between IT and CX functions get fuzzier. 

CX technology lines are blurring – which is both an opportunity and a challenge

The underlying theme that runs through these predictions is the accelerated convergence of CRM, AI and analytics, and contact center technology categories. 

This past year we saw integrations and partnership announcements between Genesys and Salesforce, between ServiceNow and Five9, and too many more to name. We also saw the hyperscale cloud companies (AWS, Microsoft, and Google) continue to pour investments into CX and AI.  We see this convergence continuing to happen, which will result in both more streamlined solutions as well as more client confusion.

As more technology vendors compete for businesses’ CX and AI dollars with similar value propositions, it’s going to be harder for businesses to determine which technologies or providers can best meet their needs. With the multitude of choices and consumption models, businesses will increasingly need a guide to help navigate which composition of solutions is going to be right for their business. 

The truth is that technology alone can’t create exceptional customer experiences. Sound CX strategy will always be foundational to realizing value from any technology innovation.