DCX Links | August 3, 2025
Welcome to the era of redefined experience.
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Welcome to the DCX weekly roundup of customer experience insights!
From AI search to post-COVID behaviors, one thing’s clear: your customers aren’t playing by old rules—and neither should you.
This week’s top reads unpack how CX leaders are cutting through feedback chaos, speeding up sluggish systems, ditching misaligned goals, and rethinking personalization to meet a new generation of digital-first, value-savvy consumers.
If you’re ready to trade assumptions for insight, and noise for clarity, this issue is your playbook.
This week’s must-read links:
Most Feedback Is Just Noise — Until You Clean It Up
Slow Sites = Lost Sales (and Lost Customers)
Are You Solving the Right Problem?
Your Customers Don’t Search Like They Used To
Freedom Through Limits
The Post-COVID Consumer Has Changed—Have You?
Most Feedback Is Just Noise — Until You Clean It Up
You don’t have a feedback problem. You have a feedback chaos problem. In this punchy, personal piece, Eli Weiss, VP Retention Advocacy at Yotpo, lays out what every CX leader knows deep down: most customer feedback feels useless because it’s scattered, inconsistent, and impossible to act on. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Why it matters:
As your brand grows, feedback pours in—from tickets, DMs, surveys, reviews.
Teams get overwhelmed. Everyone sees a different slice of the truth.
Decisions get made based on guesses, not real patterns.
The fix? A simple system:
Centralize: Get it all in one place. No more playing Slack screenshot telephone.
Organize: Use AI to tag and sort. Your team’s job isn’t to label tickets—it’s to learn from them.
Discover: Look for what’s trending, what’s breaking, what’s surprising. Ask smarter questions.
Act: Don’t let insights sit in a deck. Assign owners. Close the loop. Let customers know you listened.
The CX To-Do: Build a feedback flywheel. When you treat every complaint as a clue—not a fire—you start to move faster, solve smarter, and earn trust.
🔗 Read the article → Eli's Newsletter
Slow Sites = Lost Sales (and Lost Customers)
If your site isn’t fast, it’s failing. That’s the message from Catchpoint CTO Gerardo Dada—and he’s not sugarcoating it. Shoppers today expect pages to load instantly. If they don’t? They bounce. In fact, more than half of mobile users leave if a page takes more than 3 seconds. Ouch.
Why it matters:
You might think your site is “up,” but if it’s sluggish, it’s just as bad—or worse.
One e-commerce exec said he’d rather his site go down entirely than run slow. At least then he can put up a notice. A slow site just silently loses the sale.
And it’s not just conversions. Performance affects SEO, trust, and long-term loyalty.
Old-school monitoring won’t save you.
Just knowing your site is live isn’t enough. You need to know how it’s performing for real users in real time.
That means looking at everything:
Digital Experience Monitoring (what customers see and feel)
Internet Performance Monitoring (what’s breaking behind the scenes)
Application Performance Monitoring (what’s clogging up the tech stack)
Miss one layer, and you’re flying blind.
The CX To-Do: If your site’s slow and you don’t know why, fix your monitoring first. The best retailers are already doing this—because nothing kills a good customer experience faster than a laggy checkout.
🔗 Read the article → Retail Customer Experience
Are You Solving the Right Problem?
“What’s the goal of the goal?” might be the most underrated question in CX. In his book Reset, Dan Heath shares a simple but powerful idea: we often chase goals that look right on paper but totally miss the point in practice. It’s how a car dealership turns into a survey-hounding nightmare—and how well-intended metrics end up driving terrible experiences.
Why it matters:
That dealership wasn’t trying to annoy customers. But by obsessing over 10/10 ratings, they lost sight of the actual mission: delivering a great buying experience.
The same thing happens in CX all the time—we hit the number, then wonder why things still feel off.
A good metric doesn't matter if it pushes you in the wrong direction.
How to fix it:
Ask yourself: What’s the real point of this goal? What’s the outcome you actually care about?
Heath shares stories that hit home—from a mom redefining her fitness goal to spend more meaningful time with her kids, to a government team scrapping red tape to help veterans get the loan forgiveness they’d already earned.
The shift comes when you stop asking “How do we meet the target?” and start asking “Why did we set it in the first place?”
The CX To-Do: Take a hard look at one of your current goals. Now ask: Is this getting us closer to what really matters—or just helping us check a box?
🔗 Get The Details → Behavioral Scientist
🔗 Get The Book → Amazon.com
Your Customers Don’t Search Like They Used To
AI didn’t just change search—it blew it wide open. A new Yext report shows that 75% of people are using AI search tools more than they did a year ago. Nearly half use them every day. Google’s still in the mix, but now it’s competing with ChatGPT, TikTok, and whatever tool helps people get faster, smarter answers. Discovery is no longer about links—it’s about presence.
Why it matters:
Your customers aren’t searching the same way—or in the same place.
AI chatbots, voice assistants, social feeds… it’s all part of the journey now.
If your brand isn’t visible across these new discovery touchpoints, you’re invisible.
Everyone searches differently. Literally.
The report identifies six “search archetypes”—from the deep-diving Explorer to the scroll-happy Accidental Searcher.
Some crave detail, some want social proof, others just want the best price fast.
You can’t rely on one-size-fits-all content anymore. Your data and messaging need to meet each type where they are.
People are curious about AI—but still don’t totally trust it.
It’s great for quick info, but people still go to Google for local stuff or to verify details.
That’s a huge opportunity: if your brand data is clean, consistent, and easy to find, you can become the trusted source.
And trust doesn’t just win over customers—it helps AI get your facts right.
The CX To-Do: Check how your brand shows up in AI answers—not just Google. Then get your content structured and strategy tuned to fit real search behavior.
🔗 Read the report → Yext
Freedom Through Limits
Self-imposed constraints don’t stifle creativity—they ignite it. In this deeply thoughtful essay, designer Nathan Beck argues that limitations aren’t just part of the creative process—they’re the secret to sharpening it. While designers often rail against constraints handed down from above, the piece flips the script: what if the best ideas emerge when we choose to restrict ourselves?
Why it matters:
CX professionals juggle business goals, user needs, and tech realities daily—often under tight constraints. This article reframes those as tools, not roadblocks.
Designing within limits builds fluency, intuition, and originality—skills that matter more than ever in a world flooded with AI-generated options.
It’s a reminder that mastery comes from intentional friction, not frictionless creation.
The design grind:
Think: only two user actions per screen, no shadows or borders, or stripping out all but essential elements—these aren’t design punishments; they’re provocations.
Iconic creators like Dyson and Muller Van Severen chose narrow constraints, then mined them for all they were worth.
Repetition and variation aren’t signs of stagnation; they’re how we get better.
The bottom line:
In a world racing toward infinite AI-generated variations, human designers must reembrace the craft—the grind—of designing with discipline and curiosity.
Great experiences aren’t built by skipping the hard part. They’re built through it.
🔗 Read the article → Nathan Beck
The Post-COVID Consumer Has Changed—Have You?
Five years after COVID, your customers haven’t “gone back”—they’ve moved on. According to McKinsey, the pandemic didn’t just shake things up temporarily—it rewired how people spend time, money, and attention. If you’re treating today’s customers like it’s business as usual, you’re already behind.
Why it matters:
People are living more solo, more digital lives—and they’re not giving that up.
They’re trading down in one area and splurging in another. It looks irrational, but it’s not. The old playbooks just don’t explain it anymore.
Gen Z? They’re spending fast, using credit, and demanding convenience. They're also about to become the most powerful consumer group on the planet.
What’s changed:
More alone time, more “bring it to me”: E-comm and delivery aren’t trends—they’re table stakes.
Trust is personal: Social drives discovery, but friends and family still influence what people actually buy.
Local wins: Consumers want brands that feel close to home, not faceless and global.
Value’s been redefined: People are still splurging—even when they say they’re cutting back. It’s all about perceived value, not price tags.
The CX To-Do: Stop guessing what your customers will do next. Start digging into why they’re doing it. Upgrade your insights, personalize faster, and meet customers where they actually are—not where you wish they were.
🔗 Read the article → McKinsey
Thank you!
I hope you found value in this week’s links. See you next Sunday at 8:15 am ET!
If this edition sparked ideas, share it with a colleague or team member. Let’s grow the DCX community together!
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— Mark
www.marklevy.co
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