2025 is a landmark year for customer and employee experience

Qualtrics leaders share their expert thoughts for the year ahead

2025 will be the year hype becomes reality when it comes to improving customer and employee experiences with AI, and early leaders will have a significant advantage over the competition.

Over the last 12 months, bad customer and employee experiences became more costly. Around the world, businesses risk nearly $4 trillion because of bad customer experience, according to Qualtrics research. Meanwhile, poorly managed workplace change has created productivity pressure, lowering employee engagement, well-being, and overall experience at work. To add to the complexity, traditional ways of working and engaging with brands are being rewritten.

Businesses recognize they need to urgently rethink how they engage their customers and employees to unlock the significant impact of great experiences while mitigating the impact of a bad one, and have increasingly looked to AI as a solution to this challenge. Next year we will see brands taking this path rewarded for their efforts. More businesses will use AI in their customer and employee experience programs, with the impact profound and instant — from changing the way they do surveys through to how they tackle burnout, manage security, and demonstrate impact.

To help organizations prioritize their focuses and investments next year, Qualtrics’ team of experience management experts outline what to expect in 2025.

2025 is an inflection point for customer and employee experience

Customers and employees give brands more feedback to improve their experience — While consumers might be sharing less direct feedback with brands, the volume of feedback being shared through indirect channels, such as social media comments, online reviews, and in the call center, is increasing exponentially. Indirect feedback is up more than 60% compared to 2023, which itself was a period that saw a 32% year-over-year increase. The rapid increase of indirect feedback provides organizations with a significant opportunity to better understand the needs of their customers and employees — but only those with capabilities to capture it will capitalize.

The feedback survey gets its biggest update in a generation — The way businesses collect and analyze feedback from customers and employees will change dramatically, as brands use AI to personalize feedback questions in real-time. The questions being asked will immediately adapt based on the answers provided, helping uncover deeper and more nuanced insights that drive impactful and actionable outcomes. 

• Brad Anderson, President of Product, UX and Engineering at Qualtrics

Customers and employees come to expect AI-powered experiences — Consumer and employee expectations will shift towards AI-driven experiences as the technology’s impact is felt in their spheres of work and life. There’s an early mover advantage for organizations using AI, giving them a head start on the competition and quick results. 

AI rewrites the playbook on great customer and employee experience — 2025 is the year AI hype increasingly becomes reality across a multitude of use cases. Within customer service, AI’s greatest impact will be on the teams responsible for delivering great experiences. New capabilities make it easier for frontline employees to rapidly, independently, and confidently identify what people want and need, personalize their engagements, and seamlessly take the next best actions in the moments and channels that matter most.

Businesses improve market and competitive intelligence with new AI tools — Research teams will have access to instant insights, which can be immediately benchmarked, delivered by entirely new data marketplaces and synthetic data, meaning the need to wait weeks or months for feedback is over. This includes insights from public channels — such as social media, news, and search — searchable libraries of their own historical studies, and instant insights with synthetic data. 

• Gurdeep Pall, President, AI Strategy

AI resistance is a bigger threat than AI acceptance — Organizations embracing AI will be the most secure as Qualtrics research shows workers are using the technology whether bosses like it or not. Businesses and governments that prioritize understanding how AI works, enabling their teams, rapidly implementing the necessary guardrails, and ensuring compliance are going to create a competitive advantage. 

• Assaf Keren, Chief Security Officer

Transparency and trust the fundamentals of CX success in 2025

Transparent use of AI central to CX success — 2025 is the year AI proves its value as a tool to strengthen the fundamentals of customer experience. A fundamental part of its success will be cultivating consumer trust in the technology. To earn customers’ trust and increase comfort levels toward AI companies must be transparent – making it clear when AI is or is not used – and show the value it can provide to them directly. 

• Isabelle Zdatny, Customer loyalty expert

CX programs show their business value as boards prioritize outcomes over metrics — The focus in CX will shift from merely measuring basic satisfaction metrics to adopting an outcomes-driven approach that enhances coaching and efficiency for both human and automated agents. For location-based businesses, CX will transform into a fundamental element of corporate culture, empowering every employee to make customer-centric decisions rather than serving merely as a reporting tool for executives. 

• Manisha Powar, Chief Product Officer, Qualtrics XM for Customer Experience

2025’s biggest workplace perk: Better systems and processes

Workplace change remains relentless meaning trust and culture are key priorities — In 2025 the best leaders will make cultivating trust and building a strong employee culture clear business priorities. The pace of workplace change remains relentless, and organizations must prepare their workforce for this by empowering them to adapt it. Trust and culture are not created overnight, and leaders must be intentional and anchor on clear communication and values to develop them. 

Leaders will strike a balance between automation and humanity — Pushing for too much automation at the expense of employee experience and not driving for enough efficiency gains through technology will be costly in 2025. The companies that come out ahead will be the ones that use AI for activities that machines are well-suited for, and free up humans to do what they do best — care for and support other humans, think and work creatively, and solve complex social problems.

• Dr. Benjamin Granger, Chief Workplace Psychologist

Employee wellbeing will decrease unless leaders get comfortable showing vulnerability — While people believe their bosses are competent they do not believe they care for their wellbeing. Leaders need to urgently address this crisis of trust, and doing so requires them to prioritize asking the right questions over giving the right answers. It’s a shift that will feel vulnerable. But the transparency and humility demonstrated, alongside valuing different perspectives, will cultivate trust, and ultimately better experiences for all.

Boards get focused on employee experience metrics to drive productivity and outcomes — We will see organizations redefine how they measure and take action to ensure employees are enabled to deliver results in the modern workplace. Metrics such as employee engagement and wellbeing provide a more holistic indication of an organization's capacity to sustain productivity, and we will see them reported alongside more traditional financial and operational metrics.

• Dr. Cecelia Herbert, Workplace Behavioral Scientist

Researchers have underestimated the adoption and impact of synthetic data

The adoption of synthetic data in market research will be faster than anticipated — The majority of market research conducted next year will leverage synthetic responses - at a faster rate than currently predicted given the influx of new providers entering the market.

• Ali Henriques, Executive Director of EDGE

Healthcare and governments get rewarded for delivering better customer and employee experiences

Healthcare admin work goes down. Patient experiences go up — 2025 will be a year for testing experience innovations for patients and clinicians alike in healthcare. Patient and employee experiences will be more intertwined than ever as new technologies ease the administrative burden, while advancing efforts to improve holistic patient care delivery. Key to these efforts will be codesign of stakeholders, value alignment, and also transparency of how, when, and why the tools are used. 

Burnout in the healthcare industry goes down — Employee satisfaction and healthcare quality and efficiency are improving thanks to technologies creating new models of care. These new programs remain largely untapped, meaning organizations that choose to listen with new technologies, like conversational analytics and dynamic surveys, will pull dramatically ahead. For instance, fewer but more meaningful questions will replace static, paper surveys and lead to a richer understanding of the overall healthcare experience. 

• Dr. Adrienne Boissy, Chief Medical Officer

The best governments prioritize supporting customers through a period of change — Continued political, economic, and environmental uncertainty reinforces the critical need for governments to support their customers through this period by regularly checking in to understand if they have access to the resources and support they need. This approach — whereby feedback directly informs new policies and community action — will result in stronger positive outcomes for governments and their customers because actions are focused on solving issues at their root cause.

Countries prioritizing digitizing government grow faster, secure larger investments, and will be more prosperous — Recent investments to digitize government services in places like Denmark, Australia, and the United States have raised the bar on what customers expect from their governments and proving to leaders what's possible. Governments that fail to keep pace with their changing needs and expectations risk alienating a growing portion of their voter base, negatively impacting trust, and ultimately limiting their country’s long-term success and potential.

• Dr. Sydney Heimbrock, Government Industry Advisor