2025 CX Goals: Stop Repeating the Same Mistakes & Unlock These 3 Easy Wins
January 28, 2025
Customer ExperienceDon’t let old habits derail your progress. Discover the 3 critical wins that will set your CX strategy up for success in 2025.
Let’s get real for a second. Most of us aren’t great at sticking to New Year’s resolutions. In fact, 88% of us throw in the towel within just two weeks of getting started.
If you’re one of the 88%, no judgment — your fitness journey is your business. But, crushing your customer experience goals? That’s our business.
I’ve teamed up with the customer experience (CX) pros at Medallia to help you crush your experience management goals in 2025. We’ve identified three sneaky goal-setting habits you should ditch ASAP, plus a bunch of actionable tips to actually make those CX dreams a reality this year.
1. First off, we’ve all got to get better at goal setting. A lot better.
The challenge: Many organizations struggle to align their customer experience programs with measurable business outcomes.
The opportunity in 2025: Sounds obvious, but the start of the new year is the perfect time to conduct an annual review to reassess and refresh your customer experience goals, says Judy Bloch, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Financial Services at Medallia.
CX teams should define clear, quantifiable goals for 2025 that connect actions from customer experience programs to tangible business results.
“Think of it like setting New Year’s resolutions for your business,” explains Bloch. “Use this time to review your customer experience data, revisit your key drivers, and refresh your customer experience strategies to align with new products or priorities.”
The call to action for CX leaders: Cut the fluff, skip the vanity metrics, and start setting customer experience goals that actually align with your organization’s broader business outcomes. How?
Step 1. Create clearly defined goal statements, such as “improve product depth” (e.g., increase the average number of products purchased per customer) or “lower customer experience costs” (e.g., reduce call center volume).
Step 2. Establish goals that prioritize improving both customer feedback KPIs (such as customer satisfaction, interest in new products, or resolution rates) and operational KPIs (such as cross-sell rates, digital containment, or first-contact resolution).
For instance, if you’re focused on deepening accounts, your goal might be to increase the average number of products per client from two to three. Your customer feedback KPIs might include enhancing customer satisfaction and growing interest in new products, and your operational metrics might include increasing cross-sell or upsell rates, explains Bloch.
Similarly, if you want to lower costs, your goal might be reducing call volume. Your priority KPIs might include improving feedback metrics like customer sentiment and satisfaction and strengthening operational metrics like first-contact resolution and digital containment.
Step 3. Thread the needle between your desired outcomes (e.g., acquisition, reducing churn) and the specific actions needed to achieve those outcomes by ensuring your customer experience program’s actions directly support business objectives. For example, if your business goal is to improve customer acquisition, ensure your listening is aimed at the sales funnel and driving conversions to increase win rate.
Step 4. Make sure you’re gathering and analyzing the right feedback. As your customer experience goals evolve each year, you’ll need to adjust your customer listening efforts accordingly — including the types of customer signals you’re monitoring and how you’re using tools like Text Analytics to distill insights from your data.
2. Leave the past behind. Ditch outdated key drivers that are out of touch with customer expectations.
Just like we’ve said goodbye to popular looks of years past — RIP skinny jeans and side parts — it’s time to retire old-fashioned customer experience drivers that no longer align with modern customer expectations.
The challenge: Organizations often rely on legacy key drivers to assess and monitor their overall customer experience performance, assuming their historical importance remains intact.
But as customer preferences and market dynamics have evolved, many of these key drivers (understandably) no longer resonate with modern consumers. Think about it: A lot has changed over the last couple of decades, since the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of e-commerce and social media, and the pandemic, to name a few.
So what’s the big deal? Businesses risk misalignment when they cling to metrics that fail to capture current customer values and behaviors.
The opportunity in 2025: It’s time to harness your inner Marie Kondo. Brands can get a fresh start in the new year by reviewing and updating their organizations’ key drivers using real-time customer data and feedback.
Doing so can help your CX team:
- Unlock actionable, relevant insights that reflect today’s realities
- Identify what customers currently value
- Avoid making assumptions based on no longer accurate historical preferences and behavior
- Eliminate outdated metrics that no longer drive loyalty or satisfaction
- Discover untapped drivers that could elevate customer experiences and foster deeper connections
“Brands are static, but customers are dynamic,” says Mike Debnar, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Retail at Medallia.
What they care about is constantly changing.
You’ve probably noticed over the last few years how value, convenience, and transparency have become more and more important for consumers. These attributes have become universal key drivers across industries, from luxury brands to mass retailers. We see this play out in how digital channels have redefined how brands deliver convenience, in how consumers do business with companies they value instead of choosing brands based on price, and in how consumers may be willing to pay more when transparency reveals the value in doing so.
“If you’re continuing to rely on your legacy key drivers, you’re potentially leaving value — and loyalty — on the table,” he adds.
The call to action for CX leaders: Meet your customers where they are right now. Not where they were 20 years ago, when The Sopranos was still on-air and we had never even heard of TikTok. Get started by reassessing your drivers using modern tools like real-time feedback, Text Analytics, and generational insights to align your strategies with the realities of today’s landscape.
“The future of your brand lies with the youngest generations,” says Debnar. “Understand their behaviors and expectations, or risk becoming irrelevant.”
3. Stop listening to what your organization thinks is important, and start paying attention to what your customers think is important.
Lots of companies are still doing things the way they’ve always been done, rather than adapting their strategy to the way things should be done. That is, putting customers first. This is a big problem in the healthcare industry in particular.
The challenge: Too many brands are using rigid customer feedback surveys, asking customers to answer questions that matter to the organization rather than listening to what they have to say.
The opportunity in 2025: Companies across industries, and healthcare brands especially, have the chance to modernize their experience programs by expanding customer listening beyond surveys to include gathering open-ended, unstructured feedback to understand what truly matters.
“While the quantitative data we can gather from traditional surveys has its place, it risks overlooking the personal, human elements that shape trust and satisfaction,” explains Amber Maraccini, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Healthcare at Medallia.
That’s where using Text Analytics comes into play. This AI-powered technology can instantly analyze open-ended, unstructured feedback from across sources, including social media, online reviews, contact center conversations, video feedback, open-ended responses to survey questions, and more.
“These methods give brands the chance to figure out what mattered most to patients during their care experience, moving beyond the limits of surveys, which rely on predefined categories,” she adds. “These tools can uncover recurring themes, sentiment trends, and priorities, translating raw feedback into actionable insights. By listening directly to patients, healthcare organizations can identify what drives trust, loyalty, and better outcomes — often insights we wouldn’t have thought to measure.”
The call to action for CX leaders: Enough with the rigid metrics. Embrace a more dynamic, customer- or patient-centered strategy and adopt a modern approach to listening that combines concise surveys with unstructured feedback opportunities.
Welcome to Your Year of CX Results
We can’t promise you’ll stick to your savings, fitness, or educational goals in the new year, but if you follow these guidelines, you should expect to see real improvement with your customer experience program.
And that’s something you, your organization, and your customers will value and thank you for.
For even more insights to set you up for success in the months to come, be sure to check out our experts’ top predictions for CX in 2025.