The Great CX Stagnation
Why winning brands are losing ground in an era of unprecedented investment, and how AI-powered video creates unforgettable, loyalty-building experiences.
An Industry in Decline
In 2025, the customer experience (CX) industry confronts an uncomfortable truth: despite massive investment, CX quality is in a state of global decline. Forrester's 2025 Index reveals a multiyear downward trend, pushing customer sentiment to an all-time low.
This isn't a marginal dip; it's a systemic erosion of value. It's driven by a widening chasm between the experiences brands believe they deliver and what customers actually perceive.
The Personalization Paradox
Organizations have poured billions into martech stacks and personalization engines. Yet, the result is an explosion of generic, formulaic interactions that lack the one thing that truly retains customers: emotional resonance.
The more technology brands deploy to get "closer" to their customers, the more distant and commoditized they feel. This is the central failure of modern CX strategy.
High-Stakes Challenges for Every CX Leader
The paradox creates distinct, critical failures across the organization. Select a profile to see the impact.
Failure to Realize ROI
Manifests as a staggering failure on massive, complex tech stacks. Despite significant investments in platforms like Salesforce and Adobe, fragmented data and siloed departments prevent a unified customer journey, leading to inconsistent and frustrating experiences.
Content Velocity Crisis
Lean teams cannot manually produce the volume of tailored content required to reduce churn and maximize CLV. This personalization ceiling throttles growth and prevents the brand from engaging segments effectively.
B2B Complexity Barrier
Standard tactics are ineffective for nurturing high-stakes accounts with multi-stakeholder buying committees. The inability to tailor communications to nuanced needs makes scaling deep, trust-based relationships nearly impossible.
Escalating Costs
The failure of personalization translates directly into operational costs. Irrelevant communications and ineffective self-service options lead to higher customer effort, increased support calls, and declining CSAT scores, creating a cycle of inefficiency.
Legacy System Blockade
Outdated infrastructure, technical debt, and compliance hurdles prevent real-time data activation. This stalls critical transformation initiatives, allowing more agile competitors to capture market share.
Investment vs. Reality
The core issue is not a lack of effort, but a profound misunderstanding of what drives loyalty. Billions are spent on technology, yet customer sentiment continues to fall.
This disconnect highlights a critical failure in strategy, where technology investments are not translating into meaningful improvements in the customer experience.
Beyond Personalization: Scaling Empathy
This report moves beyond the "why" of personalization to the "how" of scaling empathy. We deconstruct AI-powered video not as a content format, but as a strategic capability.
It's about creating unforgettable, loyalty-building experiences by providing actionable playbooks, navigating data implementation, and delivering a clear framework for measuring the ROI of what truly matters: genuine customer connection.