Expert Advice for Marketing Leaders on MarTech, AI, & CX
Articles and insights about customer experience for CX and marketing professionals.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. A
well-educated customer is valuable in a myriad of ways to a brand. They
tend to adopt products and services more quickly and easily, draw less on
customer support services, and they remain customers longer. This makes an informed customer valuable to both the top-and-bottom line performance of a company.
Forrester’s 2025 Global Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) paints a concerning picture: customer experience quality is in a multi-year decline worldwide, reaching an “all-time low in North America.” Brands are feeling this, as customers continue to vote with their wallets.
88% of consumers now say trust is just as important in buying decisions as price and quality. Think about that for a moment. Trust isn’t just some emotional afterthought or goodwill product of a long-standing customer relationship. It has fundamentally shifted into a key competitive battleground and deciding factor at the point of purchase.
Mobile traffic is booming, yet the 2025 Fullstory Benchmark Insights Report delivers a reality check: the average smartphone session now looks less like effortless swiping and more like whack-a-mole with broken UI elements.
After reviewing 9.5 billion web sessions, 4.1 billion mobile sessions, and a casual 945 billion events, the study shows mobile error clicks up 667 percent year over year and dead clicks hovering at 929 per 1,000
sessions—enough to make even the most patient consumer consider carrier pigeons.
Forget chasing fleeting trends or scrambling to react to public sentiment. Today’s most disruptive companies are rewriting the playbook altogether. They are not followers of narrative; they are the authors. By strategically engineering narratives designed to shift perception, lead dialogue, and align with their audience’s deepest values, these organizations don’t just stay relevant; they dominate.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. Simply
offering a high-quality product or service is no longer enough to set your business apart from the rest. In fact, according to Salesforce, almost 90% of customers value the experience of buying and using a product or service as much or more than the product or service itself.
Marketing leaders talk a big game about “customer-centricity,” but too often that phrase is code for “sell harder with friendlier emojis.” In Belgium’s hyper-competitive telco market, Telenet turned that trope on its head. Instead of nudging customers to upgrade, the company built a program that sometimes recommends downgrades—on purpose. The result? More loyalty, stronger brand affinity, and an unexpected boost to digital engagement.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. About 1,500
customer experience, digital-business and B2C marketing leaders converged here in Nashville June 23-26 to better understand the secret to “faster revenue, higher revenue, and a better overall experience.”
In a time when marketers are told to “move fast and personalize everything,” the pressure to build meaningful, measurable customer journeys—before the competition even drafts wireframes—has never been higher. At PegaWorld 2025 in Las Vegas, the buzz wasn’t about the latest buzzword. It was about something far more pragmatic and, frankly, overdue: designing customer experiences before writing a single line of code. Tara DeZao, Senior Product Marketing Director at Pega, joined us to talk about how generative AI is helping marketers and developers prototype the entire experience upfront, using tools like Pega’s Customer Engagement Blueprint.
Loyalty isn’t dead. It’s just been grossly misunderstood. Traditional loyalty programs—built on points, perks, and promo codes—are fading into irrelevance as customers shift their expectations. They no longer reward brands just for consistency or price. Today’s consumers demand more: personalized experiences, seamless interactions across channels, and recognition beyond the checkout page.
