With Businesses Experiencing A ‘Major Shift,' It's All Hands On Deck For CX

Forbes

17-04-2025

In 2025, businesses need to transform how they look at the customer experience. It's no longer a function of a dedicated department focused on CX. Now, it's the domain of virtually all functions. Organizations that understand this, and strategize accordingly, are far better positioned to beat the competition.
This is one of many key findings in a new study, The Leader's Guide to CX Trends in 2025, from my company, Nextiva. In partnership with Dimensional Research, we went looking for the biggest CX trends of 2025, surveying more than 1,000 decision makers responsible for CX, strategy or operations. Their responses show how much the landscape has changed, and where businesses have work to do.
After years of being relatively sidelined, the customer experience has become a dominant -- often the dominant -- force in business success. Virtually everyone we surveyed (96%) said their company leadership now believes CX is a key driver of business outcomes. 'In fact, more survey respondents named CX as an important driver of business results than they did operational efficiency or even product quality,' the report explains. 'It's a major shift from years past, as reflected by two-thirds of CX leaders reporting that it's easier now to get approval for CX investments than it was five years ago.'
While businesses are ready to invest, they also need to be careful about which investments they make. With so many businesses now jumping on the bandwagon, differentiation comes from addressing the most important needs.
For example, organizations may be tempted to focus on hiring more staff in a customer experience division. While this may be part of the answer, it isn't enough. That's because now, a wide range of departments and functions have a dramatic effect on whether CX efforts succeed.
'Today, multiple customer-facing and back office teams play a role in the customer journey, influencing the way users behave in-app, make buying decisions, and receive support,' the survey finds. Respondents 'called out sales, product, digital, marketing, and a handful of other teams as part of delivering a great customer experience.'
When asked which functions deliver a great customer experience, nearly three quarters of respondents included traditionally 'back office' teams. More than four in ten cited product development and management. Nearly a third pointed to operations. Eighteen percent said they think of business operations such as legal, finance, and HR. More than a quarter of people surveyed named five or more different teams as part of delivering CX.
Many business leaders understand intuitively that people across the company impact what the customer experience is like. But that doesn't mean their organizations are doing enough to get all these departments involved in CX efforts. The overwhelming majority (85%) of people we surveyed said their organizations need more shared responsibility for the customer experience.
This new paradigm has practical implications. When people in a wide array of functions are aware of CX as a priority, they're more likely to develop ideas and solutions that help improve it.
Unifying communications to improve CX
The involvement of so many people across functions makes it more necessary than ever for everyone to share information instantly. People need access to the latest details of customer journeys, requests, pain points, efforts to resolve problems, and more. So a unified customer experience management platform that brings together data from across all different channels must be a staple. It should also be powered by AI, helping everyone glean insights instantly.
Numerous studies have explored how valuable a unified communications strategy can be on the customer experience. A new study, published in the Journal of Systems and Information Technology, looked into the success of a chatbot tool embedded in a unified communications framework.
Researcher Fernando Almeida found that this model improves completion rates. She also found that when digital marketing organizations use unified chatbots, they improve 'the quality of customer interaction, message personalization and continuous learning throughout the process.'
This is just one of myriad ways that integrating communications helps companies improve CX. In deciding which steps your organization should take, 'Take a close look at your data and start with use cases that will produce the most value for your company rather than follow any single trend,' our survey recommends.
This could prove to be businesses' biggest opportunity this year. Customers are up for grabs, ready to leave a brand over one bad experience. Businesses that empower their entire workforce to be a part of improving CX in practical ways will have the upper hand.