Ask CX leaders: What are you looking forward to in 2025?
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I asked CX leaders one short question:“What are you looking forward to in 2025 for CX?”
Here’s what they said!
This upcoming year I am going to predict and look forward to the renaissance of community - online and in person. More than ever, people need to reach out to each other for support as the world gets harder, customers get angrier and less patient, and our jobs become more nuanced and threatened by things like AI and budget cuts. Whether that means CX professionals doubling down on their involvement with community or creating their own, I think people are swinging back to understanding how important it is for us all to have a shared space where we can learn from each other, grow in our careers, and deconstruct all the trends and how to apply them to our work.
Neal Travis - Head of CX @ AIHR & Host of Growth Support podcast
2025 will be the most dynamic year for CX. With use-cases for new technologies solidifying it is becoming clearer how we will be able to push the industry forward in so many ways. I think that 2024 was a year of testing things out and trying all the new things, but 2025 will be the year where we get a much clearer vision. Aside from new technologies, I truly believe that 2025 will be a year that we connect the dots to the business, and that we can develop that skill on a broader scale across CX Professionals.
Sarah Caminiti - Head of Customer Service, US @ abcam and Host of Epochal Growth
By 2025, I’m looking forward to seeing more conversations around how vital a high-quality CX team is to a company’s success. I hope we’ll be talking more about the relationship between service and respect, and how these values shape the way businesses show up for their customers and teams. CX needs to be at the center of every business decision, and the leaders in this space should be deeply connected to all areas of the business strategy. I’m excited to see CX finally recognized as the driver of loyalty, growth, and long-term success.
Robert Armstrong - Senior Director of Customer Support
I look forward to CS and Product leaders becoming much more closely aligned as a standard CX best practice - meaning, supportability as a product roadmap feature, and support as planfully part of brand management, eg "our brand promise is to be the x (most trusted, most integrated, most flexible, etc) solution- how do we extend that to how we structure and operate customer support?”
My take: Finally, smarter use of AI agents in CX
What am I excited about for 2025? Over recent years we’ve seen vast amounts of low-quality, frustrating chatbot experiences, largely built without any CX experience behind them. All that results in is annoyed customers, and the support agent bearing the brunt of that emotion.
However, there are a lot of other uses of AI that complement CX professional skillsets, rather than wholesale trying (and failing) to replace an entire CS team.
At ElevateCX London, I saw a few examples of companies bringing out interesting AI agents - which all seemed to perform a whole lot better. I’m thinking in particular of Intercom’s Fin 2, and Forethought’s agentic AI.
I’ve recently been using Fathom (this referral link will get you 3 months Premium for free - I don’t get anything), which sits in my meetings, takes notes and writes up a full transcript, summary, and action points. Everyone who sees those for the first time is blown away at how good the notes are. I even have it set up to post over to my CRM in Notion - making it nice and searchable there in the future.
In summary, I am looking forward to a lot less crud in the AI for CX, and less of a rush to wholesale replace support and success teams.
ps: Need some help setting out your 2025 plans? A roadmap can help!