DCX Links | October 19, 2025
From fear to fuel: how smart CX teams are turning disruption into connection.
Welcome to the DCX weekly roundup of customer experience insights!
Let’s be honest — AI has everyone talking. But beneath the hype, a deeper shift is happening.
This isn’t just about new tools. It’s about new tensions. Leaders want to move fast with AI, but teams feel left behind. Companies say they’re customer-obsessed, yet real voices are lost in dashboards. Loyalty looks good on paper — until customers quietly walk away.
This week, we’re zooming in on the moments that matter:
When growth starts pulling you away from the people you’re here to serve.
When a simple design shift turns AI from reactive to proactive.
When fear of irrelevance becomes fuel for reinvention.
From SAP’s self-service win to a workshop that reframes AI as a creative ally, these stories reveal what it really takes to deliver CX that’s human, adaptive, and built to last.
Because staying relevant isn’t about chasing every new trend. It’s about listening harder, designing smarter, and leading with intent — not just interaction.
Let’s dig in!
This week’s must-read links:
The Human Side of AI: What Nish Patel Taught Me About Staying Relevant
The Next UX Revolution: Designing for Intent, Not Interaction
The Scaling Paradox: When Growth Pulls You Away from the Customer
The Loyalty Illusion: When Companies Think They’re Winning — but Customers Are Already Gone
DCX Stat of the Week: 93% of Execs Say CX Is Broken Despite Believing in Its Value
DCX Case Study of the Week: SAP Achieves 80% Self-Service Success Using AI-Powered Search
The Human Side of AI: What Nish Patel Taught Me About Staying Relevant
I met Nish Patel during an AI First community call a few months ago — and he instantly stood out. The way he talks about AI isn’t technical or transactional. It’s deeply human.
Nish is the founder of Tomorrow With Nish and co-host of ThinkingWith.ai, where he runs live workshops that help teams not just use AI, but command it. His message stuck with me: AI doesn’t take your value — it helps you find it.
Why it matters:
In his talk How Do Humans Stay Relevant During the AI Revolution?, Nish shares how living with a degenerative condition taught him to see fear as a signal, not a stop sign.
He compares AI to that same process — when machines take the “machine work,” it forces us to rediscover our creative, emotional, and strategic strengths.
The fear of losing relevance? He’s heard it from hundreds of professionals. And he reframes it as an invitation to grow.
What he’s building:
ThinkingWith.ai workshops give teams hands-on practice with real AI tools and frameworks.
It’s mindset-first — teaching people how to think with AI, not just about it.
The goal is simple: amplify human creativity while letting the tech handle the repetitive stuff.
The CX Takeaway:
Let AI do the mechanical work so your people can do the meaningful work. Growth starts when fear becomes curiosity.
🔗 Go Deeper: ThinkingWith.ai
The Next UX Revolution: Designing for Intent, Not Interaction
Christopher Smith, EY Studio+ US Customer Experience Design Leader, says we’re entering a new era of design — one powered by agentic AI, where systems don’t just respond to users, they act for them.
Why it matters:
Investment in AI is exploding — up from $50B to more than $1T since ChatGPT’s release — and 97% of leaders report positive ROI.
Agentic AI marks a shift from assistive to autonomous: systems that can pursue goals, make decisions, and adapt on their own.
Yet fear of job loss remains a major blocker, with 64% of leaders saying employees worry AI will replace, not augment, their roles.
What’s changing:
UX is moving from guiding clicks to understanding intent. The new job of design is to help AI interpret why users act — not just how.
Tomorrow’s designers will focus on behavior models and trust protocols that confirm AI systems understand context and act responsibly.
Testing will evolve too — validating not only usability but how well an AI grasps nuance, ambiguity, and emotion.
The CX To-Do:
Stop designing static interfaces and start designing relationships. In the age of agentic AI, empathy is built through pattern — systems that learn from users, adapt in real time, and earn trust through clarity and purpose.
🔗 Learn More→ EY Studio+
The Scaling Paradox: When Growth Pulls You Away from the Customer
Michael Nguyen, Head of Customer Intelligence at Enterpret, nails a painful truth: growth can quietly pull you away from the customers who made it possible.
The first 100 customers got your full attention. You knew their stories, solved their problems fast, and built trust through real connection. Then you grew — and that intimacy faded. That’s the Scaling Paradox: as companies expand, the distance between leaders and customers grows wider.
Why it matters:
Fragmented data hides the real customer story. Insights live in silos—support tickets, CRMs, social media—and leaders end up with metrics instead of meaning.
The Bain stat still stings: 80% of CEOs think they deliver great CX, but only 8% of customers agree. That gap starts when executives stop hearing customers firsthand.
Frontline employees often see issues early, but bureaucracy and “selective hearing” keep their insights from reaching decision-makers.
What smart companies do differently:
DoorDash requires everyone, even the CEO, to do a delivery or support shift monthly.
Stripe invites customers into leadership meetings for unfiltered feedback.
Canva sets quarterly OKRs to close the feedback loop with every user.
The CX To-Do:
Rebuild customer proximity as you scale. Connect silos, bring leadership closer to real voices, and create systems where feedback drives action, not reports.
🔗 Go Deeper: Enterpret Blog
The Loyalty Illusion: When Companies Think They’re Winning — but Customers Are Already Gone
Executives say loyalty is up. Customers say, not so much. PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey shows a massive disconnect between what leaders believe and what’s really happening on the front lines.
Why it matters:
9 out of 10 execs think loyalty has grown, but only 4 in 10 customers agree.
More than half of consumers say they’ve stopped buying from a brand after a bad experience.
That’s not just churn — it’s a reality check for anyone relying on dashboards instead of real conversations.
State of play:
Price and quality are the cost of entry now. What really wins people over is trust and emotional connection.
70% of execs admit customer expectations are moving faster than their company can keep up.
When leaders assume loyalty without earning it, they’re driving blind.
The CX To-Do:
Track what customers do, not just what they say. Focus on repeat purchases, referrals, and moments that create connection. Loyalty isn’t a metric — it’s a relationship.
🔗Go Deeper: PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey
DCX Stat of the Week
93% of executives admit their customer experience is “broken”—despite 94% of these same leaders believing CX strategy directly contributes to business success, according to new WSJ Intelligence and Code and Theory research of 800 C-suite members.
Takeaway: Leaders universally believe in CX’s business value while simultaneously acknowledging their execution failures—revealing a massive strategy-implementation gap that explains why CX investments often disappoint despite executive buy-in.
🔗 Go Deeper: WSJ Intelligence and Code and Theory
🔗 MORE STATS: Daily Stats published on Substack Notes
DCX Case Study of the Week
SAP Achieves 80% Self-Service Success Using AI-Powered Search
CX Challenge: Over 300 million cloud subscribers were creating expensive support tickets for issues they could solve themselves. Poor search functionality meant customers couldn’t find answers, leading to unnecessary support cases and €millions in avoidable service costs.
Action Taken: SAP implemented AI-powered hybrid search technology from Coveo that combines traditional keyword matching, semantic understanding, behavioral learning, and generative AI. They piloted first in their Concur division, then scaled across SAP for Me portal spanning 47 knowledge sources and 11.2 million documents.
Result: 80% self-service success rate achieved, with €8 million annual cost avoidance in the Concur pilot alone. The company saw a 30% reduction in support cases within six months, allowing support costs to grow slower than revenue while expanding profit margins during significant market growth.
Lesson for CX Pros: Start AI initiatives with narrowly scoped, measurable problems rather than company-wide deployments. Success comes from solving specific pain points with clear metrics, then scaling what works. Ensure your knowledge foundation is solid before adding AI—garbage in, garbage out still applies.
Quote: “We weren’t hitting our self-service targets. We couldn’t see what was happening and couldn’t measure anything.” — Michelle Lewis-Miller, Head of Digital Experience at SAP
🔗 Further Reading: Forbes Article on SAP’s AI Success
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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www.marklevy.co
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