As we step into 2025, the customer experience (CX) landscape is bracing for seismic shifts that will redefine how brands interact with their customers. Katie Costanzo, President of Customer Experience at CSG, offers three critical insights that paint a vivid picture of where the industry is heading—and the challenges that lie ahead. Here’s what you need to know to keep your brand competitive in the new year.
Insight 1: To Keep Customers in 2025, Make It Easy for Them to Leave
One of the most profound shifts in consumer behavior in 2025 is the zero-cost mindset: it costs nothing for a customer to switch brands. This has heightened customer expectations for convenience and transparency while putting immense pressure on brands to deliver. Gone are the days of locking customers into hard-to-cancel subscriptions or masking billing complexities behind opaque policies.
As Katie Costanzo explains, “In 2025, customers won’t tolerate friction in the form of unclear cancellation policies or excessive barriers. Brands that try to trap customers will lose them faster than ever.”
Instead, brands must focus upstream, creating experiences so strong that customers never want to leave. This requires a meticulous balance of trust, value, and transparency. With consumers tightening their belts and reevaluating their spending habits, loyalty will only be earned by brands that:
- Build deeper, empathetic connections with their customers.
- Offer seamless, frictionless experiences across touchpoints.
- Proactively address pain points before they become dealbreakers.
Rather than overwhelming customers with excessive communications or hiding behind cumbersome processes, brands must take every opportunity to make their experience effortless. For CX leaders, this means putting themselves in the customer’s shoes and asking, “Would I tolerate this experience?”
Insight 2: CX Leaders Don’t Know What Success Looks Like—And It’s a Big Problem
In 2024, CX quality in the United States hit its lowest point ever recorded. According to Costanzo, this isn’t a fluke but the result of a widespread inability among brand leaders to pinpoint where their customer journeys are failing.
“CX measurement will be the No. 1 sink-or-swim factor for brands in 2025,” Costanzo predicts. With rising competition and mounting pressure to prove ROI, brands that can’t measure and manage their CX performance will struggle to stay afloat.
One of the biggest mistakes brands make is over-relying on traditional metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS). While NPS provides a useful snapshot, it’s often a lagging indicator that doesn’t fully capture the nuances of customer experience. In 2025, successful brands will embrace more dynamic, real-time composite measures that incorporate:
- Effort: How easy is it for customers to interact with your brand?
- Empathy: Are you meeting customers with understanding and care?
- Emotion: How do your touchpoints make customers feel?
- Friction: Where are customers encountering unnecessary resistance?
This shift requires more than just new tools; it demands a deeper cultural change within organizations. CX leaders must go beyond surface-level insights, digging into data to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and how to get ahead of customer needs proactively. Costanzo underscores the importance of this transformation, noting, “Without robust measurement, brands are flying blind—and the turbulence is only going to get worse.”
Insight 3: Don’t Change That Channel! Every Channel Will Exist in 2025
Despite predictions of certain channels losing relevance, the reality is more nuanced. “No channel will lose value overnight, or at the stroke of midnight,” Costanzo explains. From brick-and-mortar stores to AI-powered chatbots, every channel will maintain its relevance—provided it meets the needs of the right customer, at the right time, and in the right context.
One common pitfall for CX leaders is prematurely turning off channels that appear to be underperforming. But doing so can leave entire customer segments feeling abandoned. Instead, brands must adopt a data-driven approach to understand what their customers actually want and how they prefer to interact.
Here are three guiding principles for managing omnichannel CX in 2025:
- Follow the Customer’s Lead: Whether it’s a preference for in-person shopping, social media interactions, or chatbot assistance, let customer data guide your strategy.
- Personalize the Experience: Use insights to craft interactions that make customers feel known, heard, and valued.
- Evolve Thoughtfully: While innovation is critical, moving too quickly can alienate loyal customers. Brands need to strike a balance between adaptation and stability.
Costanzo warns against underestimating the emotional component of channel management: “Customers don’t just want efficiency—they want to feel understood. The brands that thrive in 2025 will be those that take the time to meet customers where they are, both physically and emotionally.”
The New Rules of CX in 2025
As we synthesize these insights, a few key themes emerge that will define the CX landscape in 2025:
- Transparency is Non-Negotiable: Whether it’s clear billing, simple cancellation processes, or honest communication, customers will demand straightforward interactions.
- Empathy Drives Loyalty: Brands must move beyond transactional relationships to build genuine connections with their customers.
- Measurement is Mission-Critical: In a world where customer expectations are sky-high, brands can no longer afford to rely on outdated metrics.
- Omnichannel is Here to Stay: The key to success is not choosing one channel over another but creating seamless, personalized experiences across all channels.
2025 is shaping up to be a year of both immense opportunity and daunting challenges for CX leaders. As Katie Costanzo aptly puts it, “The brands that win will be the ones that make CX their north star—not as a buzzword, but as a strategic imperative.”
The stakes have never been higher. Customers are watching. And they’re ready to reward the brands that get it right—or leave behind the ones that don’t.
Katie Costanzo is President, Customer Experience at CSG.
Photo by David Becker on Unsplash