August 20, 2025 - by Synoptek
If you’re in marketing, product, customer success, or operations, you’re already feeling the pressure to elevate digital experiences. Customers expect more — not just polish or convenience, but personalization, empathy, and instant gratification across every touchpoint.
Ask yourself: when was the last time someone raved about your brand to a friend?
Not because of a successful paid campaign, but because of a deeply human, share-worthy experience.
In our recent webinar — “The ROI of CX: 11 Digital Experience Trends to Boost Growth & Retention” — experts Mark Emery, Brett Sharp, and Will Payman unpacked what investing in modern customer experience means.
They made a compelling case for why CX is no longer frosting on the cake — it is the cake. It’s your strategy, your differentiator, and your best bet at retaining loyal customers in a competitive, tech-driven market.
Ready to See These Trends in Action?
Watch the full webinar on-demand to hear real-world stories, expert strategies, and examples from Peloton, Slack, Chewy, Grainger, and more.
As Mark Emery and Brett Sharp explained, CX should shape every ingredient — from tech and data management to employee training and product delivery.
This isn’t nice-to-have fluff. It’s your business strategy. And it pays off:
- Companies that invest in CX outperform competitors by 80% (Forrester)
- Data-driven orgs are 23x more likely to acquire customers and 7x more likely to retain them (Forbes)
- 85% of customer interactions this year will occur without humans — and customers still expect to be wowed (PWC)
“Your stories are already being told. Your CX defines which ones.”
Why Customer Experience (CX) Is Everything
CX isn’t just about solving problems. It’s about designing share-worthy moments that earn trust, advocacy, and repeat business.
Consider this:
- 26% of all purchases come from word of mouth (Gartner)
- 68% of people trust peers over ads (especially if they “seem like them”) (Gartner)
- 76% believe brands lie in their advertising (Branding Strategy Insider)
Advocates — your most loyal fans — share stories 40,000+ times a year and have 2x as many brand conversations. Compared to the average customer, they’re 3x more likely to share a memorable experience. (**compiled from McKinsey & Co, KellerFey Group, Harvard Business School reports).
So give them stories worth sharing. That means creating experiences that are:
- Authentic
- Interesting
- Relevant
Key Insights from Our Experts
Our speakers didn’t just share trends—they broke down the how behind real transformation:
Will Payman: Product and Data-Driven CX
- Define the Future State: Most companies optimize the experience they have, not the one they need. Will emphasized designing customer journeys intentionally, starting with vision, not patchwork fixes.
- Modernize with Purpose: It’s not about having more tech—it’s about aligning tools with experience goals. Will highlighted Delta’s app overhaul and how converging siloed systems can unlock loyalty and trust.
- Data as a Differentiator: If your data is scattered, your CX will be too. Will advocated for customer data platforms (CDPs) and personalization engines that let mid-sized orgs compete with giants like Spotify or Amazon.
“Without clean, centralized data, personalization and AI are just buzzwords,” Will said.
Mark Emery stressed that CX is a business strategy, not a service layer—advocates aren’t built with ads, but with story-worthy experiences.
Brett Sharp emphasized the need for operational alignment, centralized feedback loops, and actionable KPIs that tie customer behavior to business impact.
11 Trends Defining High-Impact CX Today
Here’s the breakdown from the webinar — a practical playbook to guide your existing CX strategy and beyond:
1. Employee Experience as a CX Differentiator
Empower your frontline staff with empathy and autonomy to deliver moments that matter. It’s what turned Chewy into a beloved brand — not slick marketing, but handwritten cards and heartfelt service.
2. Qualified Insight as Strategic Fuel
Turn your most loyal customers into a source of innovation. Real stories, real preferences, real-time feedback — these inform initiatives with more relevance and substantial ROI.
3. Engaging Feedback Loops
Slack boosted adoption by 25% by closing the loop on product feedback — showing users they were heard and proving it with each new feature. Feedback systems only work when they’re heard, acted on, and reported back.
4. Analytics to Action
Data is only as powerful as the decisions it fuels. Translate insights into direct interventions in product, marketing, and support to drive measurable results.
5. Design Future-State Experiences
Peloton redefined their trajectory by starting with a blank slate — imagining what the experience should be, not just fixing what was broken. Don’t wait for pain to force innovation.
6. Experience-led Tech Modernization
Legacy tech is a silent CX killer. Take a hard look at your stack — if it’s not integrated, scalable, and user-friendly, it’s not serving your customers (or your teams).
6. Smarter Self-Service
Context-aware, conversational bots (like Zendesk’s Answer Bot) solve issues quickly and naturally — reducing support tickets by 25% while improving satisfaction.
7. Human First AI
AI should feel helpful, not robotic. At Sephora, AI-powered virtual try-ons increased conversions 10X — not because of the tech itself, but because it made customers feel seen, heard, and helped.
9. Personalize with Intent
Use behavioral and purchase data to deliver real relevance — give value, not volume. Spotify Wrapped isn’t just fun — it’s sticky, personal, and shared like crazy.
10. Unified Experience Integrations
Customers don’t think about channels. They want frictionless, consistent experiences no matter where or how they interact. Starbucks’ mobile ordering is a masterclass in making transactions easy and addictive.
11. CX as Strategic Growth Engine
CX must sit inside your strategic planning, not adjacent to it. Whether you’re mapping roadmaps, allocating resources, or measuring impact, CX should influence how your business moves forward.
Where Do You Stand? Try the CX Readiness Assessment
One of the most popular parts of the webinar wasn’t just the trends—it was the CX Readiness Assessment offered live to participants.
What it is: A fast, 7-question self-assessment led by one of our CX experts
What you get:
- A personalized roadmap for next steps
- Benchmarking against industry peers
- Clarity on blind spots and quick wins
Why it matters: Most teams think they’re customer-focused—until they see the gaps between insight, action, and actual outcomes.
No pitch. Just a strategy session.
Book your complimentary CX Readiness Assessment here →
Measuring What Matters: CX ROI Metrics That Count
Your experience efforts need to tie directly to growth, retention, and advocacy. Some of the most effective metrics include:
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Revenue per customer
- Churn rate / Retention rate
- Cost to serve
- Feature adoption & engagement
- Referral rates / Social sentiment
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) (with context, not in isolation)
To Create the Stories That Get Shared: Where Do You Start?
The goal of CX is simple: remind your advocates to tell your story. That only happens when you create moments worth talking about — at scale, across channels, and powered by empathy and insight.
These principles can be applied today in your product roadmap, marketing plan, or support workflows.
If these 11 trends feel like a lot, don’t worry. Our speakers shared these areas as critical first steps:
- Centralize customer data — without it, orchestration and personalization are impossible
- Prioritize team collaboration — no silos between product, support, marketing, and ops
- Start crafting your future-state vision — design the experience you want to deliver, not just fix the old one
- Run a CX readiness assessment — know where your blind spots and most significant opportunities are
Ready to dig deeper into how leading organizations are doing it?
