Customer experience trends for 2025

Let’s flashback to the start of 2024. There was much excitement around the potential of AI capabilities, especially when it came to customer experience (CX). As the year has gone on one thing became clear: AI isn’t going anywhere.   

Today’s consumers are more aware than ever of the potential of AI; some even understand the privacy concerns and challenges that come along with it. But even with the immense amount of change surrounding how consumers go about their spending, what it comes down to is a great customer experience. If they are displeased by the experience the customer is likely going to the next best business.  

Clearly put: businesses need to find ways to keep customers engaged and loyal to their brands. As as clearly outlined in the IBM Institute for Business Value report 5 Trends for 2025, "Nothing keeps customers coming back like bespoke experiences." With that in mind, here are seven customer experience trends that can help business leaders drive customer loyalty and customer retention in 2025.

Customers expect a lot from businesses. Personalized experiences aren’t enough anymore; customers expect and want hyper-personalization. This type of approach uses targeted messaging and takes a customer’s unique customer data to create experiences that are hyper-personalized.  

In 2024 we saw the growth of the personalized experience for customers take off and now it’s going one step further with AI-driven hyper-personalization. By creating customer profiles and utilizing AI capabilities like AI agents and AI-backed data analysis, businesses can target their audience and create relevant experiences that offer customers something they really want. But it isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. It requires a strong data strategy that provides clear insights into consumer behavior.

Customers want a company to anticipate their needs before they even have to think about them. This proactive approach is what customers want and expect when they come to a company in 2025. CX metrics that track the user experience are key to this proactive approach, such as customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS).  
 
The anticipatory strategy can foster a deeper connection to customers and help a company's brand mold a customer journey before the customer cites an issue or contacts the business. The business, through KPIs and AI-driven strategies, can better understand behavioral data, monitor social media, and gain qualitative insights to then preemptively solve pain points. Separately, brands are more likely to retain satisfied customers if they are proactively reaching out to customers and fixing solutions before they even become a visible issue.

Customer touchpoints only seem to be growing; brand engagement is more important than ever. This is why an omnichannel strategy is pertinent to companies looking to have a unified approach and seamless connections when managing their channels, including in-store, online, text message, and in-app. Companies are starting to discover the benefits of omnichannel engagement, especially when paired with AI capabilities.  

The AI-driven tools can help manage data across the entire enterprise, ensuring customers have a seamless experience whether it’s in-person shopping or through an app. Organizations will need to be willing to spend time and resources on managing their data and turning that data into actionable insights to better the customer journey.  

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have and will continue to be a trend for the coming year as businesses look to new technology to bring in and retain customers. Companies are creating stunning, interactive experiences for their brands that intrigue customers like never before. Louis Vuitton, a well-known luxury brand has started using 3-D technology (link resides outside of ibm.com) to mask its flagship store in New York City with its iconic luxury luggage trunk.  
 
This marketing strategy is just one of many examples of brands bringing in new technology to enhance product storytelling. This technology brings together the real-world and digital world to dazzle and woo customers. Several cosmetic companies have started to use AR mirrors to help customers interact with products in real-time and give them an unforgettable experience. 

The growing number of businesses in the world has made it even more challenging for brands to get and retain customers. Which is why loyalty and reward programs are going to be a significant trend for next year. These types of programs incentivize customers to stay and, in some cases, bring in new customers as well. The typical programs offer discounts, rebates, and sometimes even a small gift.  
 
These types of incentives make customers feel seen and appreciated for their business. Which make users more likely to recommend that brand to friends, share their experience on social media platform, and opt-in for promotions. Customers are inundated with options these days and much more likely to jump to the next best option. By using customer engagement tools paired with AI-driven technology organizations can learn what drives their customers and use it to build tailored, thoughtful loyalty programs.  

Voice assistant technology is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years, with technology like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and voice recognition helping customers make purchases with ease. The popularity of voice commerce is further driving organizations to rethink their approach to their channels.   
 
Voice technology is not a simple endeavor and requires sophisticated applications and AI-driven capabilities to ensure the human voice is being interpreted properly. Businesses will be looking to developers to help build out the voice technology feature for a seamless voice interaction. Organizations will need to lean on natural language processing, machine learning, conversational AI, among other processes to optimize this technology.

We’ve seen the growth of chatbots and AI in customer service gain in popularity over the last several years. For 2025, AI-powered customer service is a separator for businesses wanting to meet their customers’ expectations. A customer wants a quick response and an even faster resolution. Consumers of today don’t seem to mind AI-powered customer service interactions either and are more than likely expecting intelligent chatbots and predictive analytics to solve their problems. 
 
Customer service is a good starting point for organizations that are looking to introduce AI into their workflows and an area where business leaders can see exactly how well the automation is working.

Any business looking to succeed in the rapidly changing digital commerce world we live in today needs to be thinking about their CX and where to implement AI into their workflow. The task is only getting more complicated as the digital environment changes and expectations are at an all-time high from customers.

While the trends for the coming year are wide-ranging, what it comes down to is speed, convenience, and consistency. Customers want reliability. Businesses can gain customer loyalty by leveraging the right data insights through new technology while maintaining a balance with human interactions to continue helping customers feel seen and important.  

IBM Consulting’s deep expertise in customer journey mapping, design, platform implementation and data and AI can help you harness best-in-class technologies to implement transformation across the customer lifecycle.