Our Top 8 Predictions for Customer Experience Trends in 2025

These are the biggest customer experience trends that brands should embrace to deliver stronger outcomes in the new year.

In 2024, inflation, personalization, and AI were among the major driving forces shaping consumer behavior and interactions. What customer experience (CX) trends should brands prepare for in the year ahead? We asked our industry experts for their predictions for 2025 — here’s what they said will differentiate companies from their competitors over the next 12 months.

Serving up predictive, hyper-personalized experiences will become table-stakes 

1. The arrival of a new era of hyper-personalized experiences will require evolving beyond basic personalization.

Over the last decade, businesses have had the technology to tailor interactions to a certain degree — addressing customers by their first names and using their browsing history to customize content and experiences. However, in 2025, organizations will need to upgrade their capabilities and practices as we enter a new era of hyper-personalization. 

“Hyper-personalization leverages AI to collect many different data points across the entire customer journey, like browsing history, digital behavior, and other interactions, and offers it up to customers in the form of tailored content and solutions,” explains Kim Palenik, Vice President and Industry Executive Advisor for Telecom and Media at Medallia, who spent 20 years of her career working in CX for Verizon. “Not only that, it also takes things a step further by harnessing machine learning to predict what customers may want next.”

2. The best brands will harness AI and machine learning capabilities to anticipate what customers want — and deliver every time. 

Netflix and Spotify are already operating in predictive ways, but in the coming year it will be an imperative for all brands to follow suit.

“In 2025, we will witness the emergence of truly automated personalized services,” says Geoffrey Ryskamp, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Hospitality at Medallia, who has held management and operational roles with Hilton Worldwide, Marriott International, and more. He expects we’ll see companies embrace predictive problem-solving and intelligent loyalty programs as more and more consumers adopt AI in their lives (more than 50% of Americans are already interacting with AI on a daily or weekly basis) and expectations for personalized experiences soar. 

The best automated personalized services will function “less like a robotic butler and more like a thoughtful friend who anticipates your needs,” he adds. “Picture a hotel that knows you’re going to be arriving late based on your flight information, and you might miss dinner, so it proactively offers to have a late-night snack waiting in your room upon your arrival. This level of care can transform a potential inconvenience into a delightful experience.”

3. Adopting AI-powered hyper-personalization will help innovators gain a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace.

“In today’s highly competitive market, the key to attracting and retaining customers goes beyond offering the latest technology at the lowest prices,” says Palenik. Instead, brands will need to “create personalized solutions that align with customer needs and their behaviors,” she explains.

One early adopter in the telco industry has already used AI to analyze customer interactions to generate new sales leads, and has achieved a conversion rate of more than 10%, while another has turned to ultra smart chatbots to help with personalizing experiences and resolving issues in real time to increase engagement and reduce the cost to serve customers. 

“Using AI for hyper-personalization is expected to grow as customers prefer interactions that are tailored to their needs,” she adds.

CX leaders will double down on closing the loop at scale

4. Closing the loop has been a priority for businesses for some time, but in 2025 successful brands will use AI to grow their efforts.

There’s a huge opportunity to adopt new capabilities, such as Medallia’s Smart Response, to make closing the loop with customers who provide feedback possible at scale. 

“With AI, we can take everything we know about customers — about their experiences, their locations, and interactions — and craft the perfect response to get the customer to come back more often that a human agent can then review, modify, and send,” says Mike Debnar, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Retail at Medallia, who previously led customer experience and digital innovation at 7-Eleven. 

These capabilities will save teams time and enable them to make every customer who reaches out with feedback feel heard. 

5. Savvy brands will evolve beyond prioritizing the inner loop and zero in on the outer loop to address CX breakdowns. 

“For far too long, the focus we’ve had on closing the loop has been the inner loop component, that one-to-one individual follow-up that takes place following a survey. The difference maker in 2025 is going to be focusing on the outer loop where we work on systemic change that drives continuous improvement throughout the organization,” says Judy Bloch, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Financial Services at Medallia, who has held customer experience leadership roles at Sprint, Citi, and UMB.

That’s because investing in resolving outer-loop issues will help brands get to the root cause and prevent them from recurring. Plus, closing the outer loop is a scalable approach to addressing challenges the entire customer base is experiencing — not just those who respond to customer feedback surveys. 

Lastly, she adds, focusing on the outer loop will enable brands to ensure that their policies, processes, interactions, and cross-channel touchpoints exceed customer expectations, which will foster deeper customer engagement and loyalty.

View even more 2025 customer experience trend predictions on Exp Now

Building trust will be a critical differentiator

6. The future of government will require agencies to build trust through listening and accountability. 

The public sector is undergoing a period of transformation, in which innovators are focused on providing proactive and seamless services to the right person at the right place at the right time. 

Technology is part of what’s making this shift possible, but technology by itself isn’t enough. 

Successful agencies will “focus on building trust through listening and accountability…listening to citizens and employees, acting on their feedback, and communicating results with transparency,” says Lee Becker, Medallia’s Senior Vice President and Executive Advisor for the Public Sector and Healthcare, whose more than two decades of experience includes developing programs for customer, patient, and employee experience at the Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense and co-leading the White House cross-agency priority goal on customer experience for all of government. 

“By listening, acting, and continuously improving, we can create a proactive and predictive government that delivers for all the people. That’s the transformation we need,” he adds.

7. Healthcare organizations embracing personalized preventative care and AI-powered support will set the standard.

Patients as informed consumers are increasingly leveraging wearables, genetic testing, and health apps to take monitoring and managing their health into their own hands, and, as such, they expect more from healthcare organizations — whether that’s customized care plans, personalized communications, or seamless experiences that help them feel supported along the way, says Amber Maraccini, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Healthcare at Medallia, who has held experience leadership roles at Renown Health and worked as a clinical assistant professor at the University of Nevada. Making an impact won’t just involve “treating patients and members; it will be about building trusted relationships that encourage ongoing engagement,” she adds.

“Meeting people where they are on their health journeys will be key to gaining and retaining their trust,” she explains. And technology, especially AI, will play a big role. Game-changing innovations that will make a difference in the year ahead include AI-powered decision support tools, ambient listening devices, AI-powered scribes, and advanced decision support systems, all of which can “significantly reduce the administrative load on clinicians, allowing them to spend more time on patient and member care,” says Maraccini.

Organizations will need to be careful to integrate AI in ways that foster trust, respect privacy, and, ultimately, enhance care quality.

“Personalized preventative care and AI-powered support aren’t just trends to watch, they’re expectations that are here to stay” and the call to action for leaders is to look for ways to implement these approaches to grow trust and improve outcomes, she adds.

Empowering employees in real time will be the next frontier in elevating CX 

8. Moving beyond employee engagement surveys will be critical to having both a great employee experience (EX) and CX in 2025. 

“Everything, I mean absolutely everything, that’s delivered to a customer, from products to services to facilities to everything about the experience, comes from employees,” says Melissa Arronte, PhD, VP, Executive Advisor for Employee Experience at Medallia, who previously served as a leader in HR and analytics at Liberty Mutual Insurance and Citizens Bank. 

That’s why you can’t provide a good customer experience without having an effective employee experience strategy that’s built on more than just employee engagement surveys, she adds. Engagement surveys serve a purpose — they provide useful benchmarking against other companies, but brands need to do more than that.

True employee experience programs are about “empowering your employees to deliver on your customer promise,” she explains.

In 2025, leaders will give employees the chance to speak up about what’s making it hard for them to do their best work in the moment. They will provide real-time feedback mechanisms to capture insights about the obstacles that are getting in the way — such as issues with a company’s processes, systems, and technology — and give employees the opportunity to suggest solutions for these blockers that are preventing them from living up to the customer promise.

“This is how we drive customer experience. This is the last white space in CX,” says Arronte.

2025 will start a new transformational era for CX

The next year will be about retiring reactive customer experience strategies and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. The customer experience trends and best practices we expect to separate leaders from laggards include investing in hyper-personalized and predictive experiences, closing the loop at scale, prioritizing actions and technologies that foster consumer trust, and cultivating meaningful employee engagement to better serve customers across touchpoints and interactions each and every day. 

For more on why these customer experience trends (and others) will dominate the year ahead, watch our experts as they reveal even more insights about their top predictions for 2025.