Proactive Customer Experience Management

As a Chief Customer Officer, I’m seeing firsthand that we’re heading into one of the most defining years for the customer landscape. Expectations are shifting faster than many organizations can adapt. AI is rewriting how value gets delivered, customers are demanding deeper personalization, and the margin for friction is shrinking by the day. From my vantage point, 2026 won’t be just another “CX innovation year.” It’s shaping up to be the year Customer Success fully steps into its role as a strategic growth engine — influencing revenue predictability, product direction, and the overall health of the business in ways we’ve talked about for years but are only now truly realizing. Looking across our customers, teams, and the broader market, I believe five trends are emerging that will shape the future of customer success in 2026:   1. Customer Success becomes a core revenue engine. 2. AI copilots become standard in every CX tech stack. 3. Hyper-personalized customer journeys become the baseline expectation. 4. Human support focuses on complexity; AI handles the rest. 5. CCOs measure success using value creation, not activity metrics. Which trends are you already feeling inside your organization? Which ones do you think will make the biggest impact?

I analyzed 3,500+ CX job descriptions from this year, and the results confirm what many of us suspected: Customer Success & Support roles are more technical than ever. Here’s what’s changing: 🔴 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐚 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐭-𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚 𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐞-𝐭𝐨-𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 → CRM, AI, and Salesforce dominate job descriptions. Employers want candidates skilled in automation, integrations, and reporting. 🔴 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 = 𝐦𝐚𝐣𝐨𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐞𝐝𝐠𝐞 → API, SQL, Python, and JIRA skills are in demand. CX teams are expected to query databases, troubleshoot integrations, and collaborate with product and engineering. 🔴 𝐑𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐞𝐝 → Support Engineer and Support Ops roles are on the rise, blurring the lines between customer support, product development, and technical operations. 🔴 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐂𝐗 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐝 → The word "training" appeared in 554 job descriptions, showing that many companies expect CX teams to onboard customers, educate teams, and drive product adoption. 𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲: Build your technical skills. The industry is shifting toward data-driven, automation-friendly, and tech-integrated CX teams. Are you seeing this shift in your hiring process?

My annual Customer Service & CX Trends and Predictions are here—Part One. This year’s trends focus on what has nothing to do with AI (Part Two is coming next week) and everything to do with what customers value most right now. Here are a few highlights: • Customers are smarter than ever and they compare you to the best brands they do business with, not your competitors • Proactive service is becoming a powerful competitive advantage • Speed = respect. Wasting a customer’s time is a deal-breaker • Employees expect the same great experience internally that customers expect externally • Trust isn’t just important. It is part of the customer experience None of this is complicated, but it is critical. When companies focus on ease, honesty, and consistency, trust and loyalty follow.

A little present before Christmas: the 8th edition of the CX landscape is out. I got it over the line before the end of the year. The total number of participants grew by 12% since July 2024 to 1,300. CX remains a strategic and attractive market, and it delivers many of the top AI use cases. That growth should surprise no one. Conversational AI and customer-facing agents drove the largest increase, with, in particular, a surge of new entrants in customer support automation and voice agents. The category is maturing fast. It was once a hyperscaler-led market with a long tail of small players. In 2025, several providers will cross $100M ARR, with a solid cohort over $50M. Beyond customer self-service and agent augmentation, agents are emerging for workflow automation, driving the birth of an AI Agent Platform category. Data platforms have made their coming out. For years, CRMs served as the reference customer data repository while other players positioned themselves as feeders of interaction details and dispositions into those systems of record. With AI, more providers now see the imperative for a comprehensive data foundation, consolidating interaction records, recordings, transcripts, and customer profiles into dedicated platforms. This 8th edition may well be the last to use the current construct. I created the first version in 2017 based on a few assumptions: 1) Self-service would become the front door for service. 2) The system of engagement would be contested between interaction management platforms, including CCaaS with a voice lineage, Digital Customer Service with a digital channel lineage, and CPaaS with a messaging lineage, and workflow platforms, whether CRM or BPM/low-code platforms. 3) Analytics would remain a distinct layer, combining best-of-breed applications and aggregation platforms. This framework has remained remarkably stable, evolving only slightly over the years. As I reflect on the changes of the past year, it’s time to consider structural changes: • Data platforms are eclipsing interaction management and workflow software as the foundation of the CX stack. • Above this, an agentic layer will emerge, supported by a monitoring and control layer. • Self-service and human service, historically loosely coupled, will become tightly intertwined to enable new, collaborative motions. • Resolution and fulfillment workflows will become an integral part of the stack. • The CX stack will need to support not just service and support but also sales and retention, demanding new capabilities and accommodating these new roles. • Work allocation, once focused on instant distribution of inbound inquiries, will change. Combine the new roles to support, a more diverse mix of real-time, asynchronous, and deferred/scheduled interactions, and the growth of outbound driven by proactive service enabled by AI, and the result is a different work allocation model. But that’s for next year... #cx #ccaas #ai

Glad I did not Skip this!! With the constant avalanche of reports on customer insights, it’s easy to skim through most.But I’m glad I took the time to read the 2025 Qualtrics Global Trends Report (https://shorturl.at/EZI0v) last year. It reinforced some critical CX truths that every organization should pay attention to. 🔥 Here are my top three takeaways: 1️⃣ Customer Expectations Are Higher – and Patience Is Shorter ⏳ 💡 57% of customers say they will walk away after a bad experience. But here’s the key insight: a bad experience is relative. More importantly, improving CX isn’t always about massive leaps—sometimes, incremental improvements make the biggest impact. 🔑 A shift from level 1️⃣ to level 3️⃣ service might drive 15% more impact than a jump from level 3️⃣ to level 5️⃣. Why? Because customers prioritize 🔹 accessibility & 🔹 reliability over premium, hyper-personalized service. 💭 Personal Experience: At Interswitch, we leverage our Key Account Management team as a personalized service delivery channel for our largest customers while simultaneously working to fix long-term legacy service gaps. 2️⃣ Trust Is the New Currency 💰 🔎 Globally, 61% of customers prioritize trust in the information they receive—ranking it higher than convenience and even empathy. Clear, timely communication is a major trust builder, yet too often, companies hesitate when things go wrong. 🛑 Lesson Learned: From marketing to customer support, walk the talk—be honest, reliable, and clear in your messaging. Transparency wins customers. 💬 Ian Golding once emphasized in a Women in CX ™ lecture that courage is a core CX leadership skill. Facing customers and communicating transparently—even in the face of disruptions or failures—is what actually builds trust. 3️⃣ Feedback Participation Is at an All-Time Low – Get Creative! 🎭 📉 Traditional surveys—especially those sent via email—are seeing declining response rates. This means Voice of Customer (VoC) programs must evolve. 🔍 It's no longer enough to rely on one feedback method. Instead, we must listen through multiple channels: ✅ 📢 Social media sentiment ✅ 🏆 Brand equity insights ✅ 📊 Operational data (repeat purchases, transaction volumes) ✅ 📉 Behavioral patterns 🎯 Our Approach: We struggled initially with traditional VoC surveys. However, during #CustomerServiceWeek 2024, we relaunched an ethnographic study program 📌, embedding teams across different functions to sit with customers in their environments and observe firsthand how they interact with our products. 🚀 The key takeaway? Innovate how you listen. Customers are always giving feedback—you just have to know where to find it. 👂 There’s so much more to unpack from this report, more insights loading in a following post. 🤔 What are your thoughts? Have you observed similar shifts in customer expectations and feedback trends? Let’s discuss! 👇🏽 #CX #CustomerExperience #Trust #VoC #CustomerInsights #Leadership #Innovation #CustomerEngagement

2026: The year Customer Success goes predictive. Reactive is outdated. Proactive isn’t enough. Predictive is the new standard. My predictions for 2026 in digital Customer Success are clear: AI, automation, and data isn't just tools, it's the catalysts for transformation across implementation, adoption, and renewal. 🚀 Implementation shifts from effort heavy to outcome ready. Expect tailored onboarding powered by AI and data. Customers won't just be onboarded, they’ll be activated, faster and with less friction. 📈 Adoption shifts to value, not usage. Digital engagement will evolve from proactive nudges to value triggered experiences. Adoption isn’t success BUT outcomes are. And that requires surfacing the right support to the right person at the right time in the way they prefer to receive it. 🔁 Renewals won’t be a checkpoint anymore and they’ll be a byproduct. With data-driven, personalized journeys, renewal becomes seamless. Feedback loops, usage patterns, and measurable impact will tell the story before the QBR/EBR or even your heal score ever will. 👉 Based on my experience building CX/CS programs at scale, this shift to predictive success means: 🔹 Detecting risk before it becomes churn 🔹 Driving engagement before usage drops 🔹 Unlocking growth before a customer realizes they need it This is what CX@Scale really looks like and is happening today. It's not about more tech it is about more impact. 💡 The opportunity? Leverage AI not just for scale, but for strategic foresight. What are you doing to move from proactive to predictive in 2026? 👇 Drop your insights in the comments. Let’s build the future of CS/CX together. #poweredbypeople #GSD #CSXInnovations #customersuccess #DCX #customerexperience #reactiveproactivepredictive

“CX Should Be Measured by Behavior, Not Surveys.” For years, Customer Experience & Customer Success have been built on what customers say — surveys, NPS comments, CSAT scores, post-call feedback. But in the AI era, there’s a blunt truth we can’t ignore: ✅ Behavior is more honest than opinions. What people do tells you far more than what they say. A customer might rate you a “9,” then ghost you for six months. They might say they’re “satisfied,” then move half their spend to a competitor. They might leave positive feedback… while quietly reducing usage every week. Surveys capture sentiment. Behavior captures reality. AI is making behavioral signals impossible to ignore: 📉 Declining usage ⏳ Slow time-to-value 💸 Reduced spend velocity 🔄 Increased support friction 👤 Lower stakeholder engagement 📦 Shrinking implementation progress 🔍 Growing reliance on workarounds These are the real indicators of customer experience — not a number on a dashboard. The future of CX belongs to leaders who shift from: ❌ Chasing response rates ❌ Obsessing over scores ❌ Treating VOC as “the truth” To: ✅ Tracking behavioral patterns ✅ Predicting risk through signals ✅ Measuring value, not sentiment ✅ Designing experiences customers naturally choose In 2025 and beyond, customer experience & customer success are no longer what people say about your company… It’s what their behavior proves.

I’m honored to be featured in Women in CX ™ Predicts: The CX Trends Shaping 2026. I just read the full piece and it confirms what seasoned practitioners already know but too few leaders act on: we’re not entering another feature race. We’re entering a rebalance of what actually drives experience value. Two shifts stand out for me. 1. Feedback escapes the CX function Customer feedback can’t stay locked inside specialist teams. In 2026, Voice of the Customer stops being something CX owns and becomes something the business uses. Product, Marketing, Operations, and Support working from the same trusted customer intelligence — at the same time. AI is what makes this possible. It removes the research bottleneck, automates interpretation, and turns feedback into shared infrastructure. The role of CX shifts from curator to enabler — building systems that allow insight to flow where decisions are made. 2. CX outgrows its artefacts Journey maps, NPS, dashboards — they helped us get here. But they’ve reached their limit. Static artefacts can’t reflect real behavior unfolding in real time. By 2026, leading organizations will treat CX as a living, learning system — one that senses friction as it happens and responds with speed and intent. This is where AI stops being experimental and becomes foundational: – Detecting issues before scores drop – Connecting experience signals to operational and business impact – Enabling anticipation instead of reaction CX moves from storytelling to value orchestration. In 2026, customer experience is no longer a function. It’s an intelligent system running through the business. That’s the shift I believe in — and the one the Women in CX 2026 predictions articulate clearly. If your CX strategy still depends on ownership, artefacts, and lagging scores, the next two years will be uncomfortable. Full article in the comments.

CX leaders are focusing on the wrong areas to automate to improve quality. Ryan Flynn Ria Anand and team did the research to show that is the case. Here Ryan talk about the path to better CX experiences with data driven quality automation for AI and Human agents. ---------- Summary of conversation below: ✅ Limitations in Current CX Quality Misdirected Resources: Many CX and QA leaders spend significant time and money evaluating agent behaviors that have no measurable impact on ROI or the company’s bottom line. Lack of Impact: Current evaluation systems often fail to "move the needle" on critical North Star metrics such as CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) or sales conversion rates. 📉 Why CX Goals Are Misaligned Institutionalized Rubrics: Companies often stick to outdated evaluation criteria simply because "that’s the way it’s always been done." Emotional Attachment: Leaders are often personally attached to the rubrics they’ve built over years, making them resistant to refining or removing unnecessary metrics. Historical Tech Limitations: In the past, the lack of automation forced teams to rely on manual reviews, which only covered a tiny (and often skewed) percentage of total interactions. 🎯 The Recommended Strategic Approach Data-Driven Correlation: Use benchmark analysis across the entire customer base to identify which specific behaviors actually correlate with positive customer sentiment and resolution. Consolidation: Simplify evaluation lists by stripping away "noise" and focusing strictly on the behaviors proven to drive revenue and satisfaction. Vertical Specifics: Tailor these benchmarks to specific industries rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach to every business. 🚀 Getting Started & Future Outlook Shift to 100% Coverage: Move away from manual QA of a small sample size to automated measurement of 100% of calls to ensure fair and accurate scoring. Strategic Empowerment: By using data to prove what works, CX leaders can enter executive meetings with the confidence to act as strategic partners rather than just cost centers. Agent Trust: When agents see that they are being measured on behaviors that actually matter—and that the data is objective—it fosters a sense of fairness and improves coaching outcomes.