Top Customer Experience Trends + CX Best Practices for 2025

Customer experience (CX) trends are reshaping how businesses connect with their audiences. According to an Intercom Customer Service Trends Report, 87% of support teams reported that customer expectations increased in 2024—a significant 12-point jump from 2022. 

Today’s customers demand more than quality products. They expect brands to deliver hyper-personalized experiences, provide seamless support across multiple channels, and actually know who they are. 

Whether you’re a senior product marketing manager, CX leader, or executive-level stakeholder, staying on top of customer experience trends helps you scale with purpose, attract and retain more customers, and build experiences that deepen customer loyalty.

Top customer experience trends

• Finding a balance between AI and human agents
• Solving problems before customers ask
• Connecting channels for a cohesive experience
• Acting on customer data in real time
• Dialing in personalization
• Understanding customer sentiment
• Prioritizing data quality and consent

In its State of the Connected Customer report, Salesforce found that 80% of customers consider their overall experience with a business to be as important as the business’s products or services. To stay competitive, it’s essential to align your CX strategy with the trends shaping customer expectations today. Here’s an overview of emerging trends:

Finding a balance between AI and human agents

AI is transforming the way customers interact with brands. With AI-powered tools now embedded in everything from live chat to back-end automation, businesses are streamlining customer interactions and boosting contact center performance. According to the research firm Gartner, “85% of customer service leaders plan to explore or pilot a customer-facing conversational GenAI solution in 2025.”

Yet human connection remains irreplaceable. According to a survey from the data company Five9, “75% of consumers still prefer speaking to a real human for customer support.” The best support models blend AI-powered customer engagement tools with thoughtful human interaction, offering speed and empathy in the same experience.

Solving problems before customers ask

According to HubSpot, 90% of customers say getting an answer to their problem immediately is important, and 60% consider “immediate” to be 10 minutes or less. With today’s data analytics tools, you can drastically reduce wait times by anticipating customer needs before they reach out. 

Instead of reacting to support tickets, forward-thinking brands use predictive analytics to identify potential issues, remove friction points, and deliver proactive solutions throughout the customer journey.

Connecting channels for a cohesive experience

Modern customers engage with brands across multiple digital channels like email, SMS, live chat, mobile apps, and social media, in addition to in-store interactions. They expect every touchpoint to feel consistent and connected. Omnichannel integration ensures that customer data flows seamlessly between these channels, giving support teams the context they need to deliver fast, relevant service. The revenue impact is significant too. According to Firework, “Omnichannel strategies can boost average order values by 13%.”

Beauty retailer Sephora’s omnichannel strategy connects app, web, and in-store experiences to make shopping seamless for customers. The company transformed its checkout experience by introducing Tap to Pay in its stores, allowing customers to pay anywhere without waiting in line. This resulted in checkout times that were twice as fast as before and reinforced the attention to detail customers can expect across all Sephora touchpoints.

Acting on customer data in real time

Improving customer experience is not just about gathering information—it’s about leveraging data instantly. Real-time data integration allows brands to respond to trends quickly, test changes, and track customer interactions with clarity.

Consider DECKED, a company that makes organizational tools for trucks. By leveraging Shopify’s real-time insights, the company gains instant visibility into customer engagement patterns. This agility enables them to create targeted marketing materials that directly address customer needs and preferences.

Real-time data is especially valuable for customer support teams. When you spot a surge in delivery questions, you can immediately update chatbot scripts, refresh FAQ pages, and send targeted email updates—all before the issue escalates.

But speed without strategy creates chaos. The strongest support teams find the right cadence, making quick, informed decisions, then analyzing performance before iterating further. Real-time data gives you the agility to respond and the insight to improve continuously.

Dialing in personalization

In 2025, personalization goes much deeper than inserting a customer’s name in an email. Shoppers expect brands to remember their preferences, anticipate their needs, and deliver relevant experiences. A McKinsey study revealed what customers truly want from personalized brand interactions: 

1. Relevant recommendations. They don’t want generic recommendations; they want to know about products and packages they wouldn’t have thought of themselves.

2. Well-timed messages. Ideally, messages are timed while they are actively shopping, but messages that come in the same day they’ve visited a store or exactly a week later work too. 

3. Relevant reminders. Customers are looking for helpful reminders about products they love but aren’t actively tracking. If something is back in stock or available in a new color, customers want to know about it. 

4. Seamless experiences. Customers are looking for businesses to connect the dots between online and offline shopping. So, if a customer inquires about a product in-store, they likely want to get updates about it via text or email. 

Today’s brands are meeting these expectations by applying hyperpersonalization across the entire customer journey. AI-driven product recommendations, individualized discount codes, personalized homepage layouts, and dynamic email content based on browsing behavior are just some of the ways brands meet customers where they are.

Understanding customer sentiment

Customer sentiment—the emotions and feelings customers express about your brand—reveals more than traditional metrics. Instead of just tracking what customers say (like a star rating or survey score), sentiment analysis examines how they say it. Using methods like post-purchase surveys or social listening tools such as Sprinklr, brands can pick up on the tone of customer feedback by analyzing chat transcripts, product reviews, and social media comments. 

According to Hootsuite’s 2025 Social Media Trends survey, 62% of social marketers use social listening tools—and for good reason. Customer sentiment gives you a window into customer satisfaction that can impact other metrics. Qualtrics found that only 16% of customers actually leave public feedback and only 22% leave reviews, meaning most of the emotional truth lives in less obvious places. By tracking sentiment across customer touchpoints, you can catch problems earlier, prioritize support responses more effectively, and understand which parts of your experience need refinement. 

Prioritizing data quality and consent

Collecting data is easier than ever, but how you use that data is what really matters. People want to feel confident that their information is safe and that it’s being used in a way that actually benefits them. Cisco’s 2024 Data Privacy Benchmark Study found that 94% of organizations believe customers wouldn’t buy from them if they didn’t protect data properly. In a world where pop-ups ask for emails and personalized ads follow you around online, customers are paying attention to how brands handle their data. The best companies lead with transparency, collect data properly to ensure its quality, and clearly ask for consent.

Data quality means making sure the information you have is accurate, up to date, and actually useful. It’s the difference between sending a helpful reminder to reorder and recommending something a customer already bought last week. If your data is off, it can make your messages feel impersonal or disconnected. Over time, those small mistakes can add up and weaken customer trust.

Consent is just as important. Customers want to know what you’re collecting, why you’re collecting it, and what they’ll get in return. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 37% of respondents “feel overwhelmed by figuring out what they need to do” about data privacy. The most trusted brands make it easy to manage preferences, clearly explain opt-ins, and show the value of providing information right away. For example, you could offer 10% off in exchange for signing up for text messages. When you treat customer data with care and clarity, you build trust.

Best practices for the new age of customer service

Customer-obsessed companies are always looking ahead at CX trends. Here’s how to adapt your approach to meet evolving customer expectations:

• Test new strategies. Stay curious and experiment regularly. Whether it’s implementing an AI chatbot, providing real-time tracking updates, or asking for post-purchase feedback, testing helps you discover what resonates with your specific customers. 

• Invest in CX tools. Look for customer experience platforms that offer real-time data, analytics dashboards, automated workflows, and integrations across multiple channels to boost both speed and efficiency.

• Involve the whole team. Customer insights benefit every department—not just marketing or customer service teams. When everyone understands what customers are saying, all team members can contribute innovative solutions and achieve better outcomes.

• Think like your customer. The best way to improve customer service is to experience it yourself. Go through your checkout flow. Submit a support ticket. Open your own marketing emails. When you regularly step into your customer’s shoes, gaps in the experience become much easier to spot and solve.