DCX Links | August 17, 2025
The Clock Is Ticking On Traditional CX — Reinvent Or Be Replaced
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Welcome to the DCX weekly roundup of customer experience insights!
We’re wired to chase what we can measure. Clicks, conversions, quarterly reports — they’re easy to track and hard to ignore. But what happens when the metrics that once defined success stop telling the full story?
This week, the customer experience landscape is revealing a deeper truth: the most meaningful influence often happens before the click, between the channels, and inside the relationships we build, with both customers and colleagues.
From AI tools that answer questions without driving traffic, to underappreciated team members who make everyone else better, the theme is clear: value isn’t always visible at first glance. It shows up in trust, timing, and the quiet moments that shape decisions.
CX leaders have a choice. We can keep optimizing what’s easy to count. Or we can start prioritizing what actually counts.
Let’s dig in.
This week’s must-read links:
SEO’s New Reality: Showing Up Where the Click Never Happens
The Boardroom’s Blind Spot
The 2025 Customer Communications Wake-Up Call
The Hidden Skill That Turns Teams Into Powerhouses
The New CX Arms Race
When Intelligence Has No Limits
SEO’s New Reality: Showing Up Where the Click Never Happens
Google’s AI Overviews are flipping SEO on its head. Instead of clicking through to your site, more people are getting their answers right at the top of search. No visit, no engagement, no chance to wow them with your experience. For some brands, that’s meant traffic plunges of 20–50%.
Why it matters for CX:
Discovery is shifting. If your content isn’t in the AI Overview, you might be invisible at the exact moment customers are forming opinions.
The game is no longer just “rank high, get clicks.” It’s about being part of the answer so you can still influence trust and buying decisions.
Paid and organic are blurring, as Google’s priority is serving the most “valuable” (read: revenue-driving) result to the user.
What smart brands are doing:
Updating content monthly to match what customers are asking right now.
Adding richer structured data so Google actually understands, and features, your content in AI answers.
Measuring awareness and sentiment alongside clicks, since influence now matters as much as traffic.
The takeaway: In the zero-click era, you still have to show up, just in a different way. CX leaders should treat AI search visibility like any other touchpoint: it’s a chance to set expectations, earn trust, and guide customers before they ever land on your site.
🔗 Read the article → Marketing Brew
The Boardroom’s Blind Spot
Boards spend hours dissecting financials and risk reports, but too many still treat customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) as side issues. Alisa Coren Norris and Jessica Saperstein say that’s a miss, because the two are inseparable. Happy, engaged employees create better customer outcomes, and customer insights help companies make smarter internal moves. Ignore either, and you’re flying half blind.
Why it matters:
Customers now expect speed, personalization, and convenience, and they switch fast when brands don’t deliver.
Employees want more than a paycheck. Purpose, flexibility, and culture are shaping how they show up for customers.
Forrester research shows “customer-obsessed” companies grow revenue and profit nearly twice as fast as competitors.
State of play:
Ritz Carlton and Salesforce weave customer focus into daily work through training, stories, and empowerment, it’s cultural, not a campaign.
Many boards still rely on narrow, short-term metrics that miss the bigger CX/EX picture.
Research shows belonging and trust drive long-term performance more than pay alone.
The takeaway: CX and EX should be discussed in the boardroom with the same urgency as P&L. Aligning them makes you faster at spotting risks, smarter in strategy, and stronger over the long haul. If you’re not listening to both your customers and your employees, you’re missing half the story.
🔗 More Info → Directors & Boards
The 2025 Customer Communications Wake-Up Call
A global Sinch survey of 2,800 consumers and 1,600 business leaders reveals a clear truth: modern customer communication is no longer about just “getting the message out.” It’s about keeping people engaged, informed, safe, and happy, all at once, across multiple channels, and without breaking trust.
Why it matters:
58% of consumers want to choose their preferred channel, and 36% expect messages across more than one.
Security, cost, and tech integration remain top challenges. But the brands that solve them win loyalty.
AI, RCS, and connected tech stacks are fast becoming table stakes for real-time, personalized interactions.
State of play:
Email still dominates for promotions (77%), but Gen Z is pushing text, WhatsApp, and in-app messaging.
Over-messaging frustrates 41% of consumers, and redundancy is nearly as bad.
RCS is emerging as a trust signal, with verified logos and encryption improving engagement and safety.
The takeaway: CX leaders can’t treat communications as background noise. In 2025, every update, promotion, alert, or support message is a moment to strengthen, or weaken, the relationship. The winners will connect the dots between tech, trust, and timing.
🔗 Get the full report→ The State of Customer Communications 2025
The Hidden Skill That Turns Teams Into Powerhouses
Some people have a knack for making everyone around them better. In basketball, Chris Paul is that player. In business, they’re “super-facilitators,” the ones who integrate diverse expertise, make sure every voice is heard, and build the trust that fuels true collective intelligence. Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki says it’s not just a gift, it’s a skill anyone can learn.
Why it matters:
Most organizations still prize lone genius over group genius, but data shows the highest-performing teams succeed through integration, not individual brilliance.
In CX, that means your team’s ability to co-create solutions with empathy and balance is more valuable than any single “star” hire.
Super-facilitation keeps talent engaged, prevents duplication of effort, and unlocks faster, more original problem-solving.
State of play:
Empathy and attunement allow super-facilitators to spot strengths, pair people strategically, and boost underperformers with earned trust.
They consciously distribute airtime, ensuring all perspectives shape the outcome.
Pixar’s Brain Trust model, candid, nonhierarchical collaboration guided by catalytic questions, is a gold standard.
The takeaway: In CX, where innovation and execution often hinge on cross-functional alignment, becoming a super-facilitator may be the single most important leadership upgrade you can make.
🔗 Read the article → HBR
The New CX Arms Race
AI isn’t just streamlining operations, it’s redefining what customers expect from every interaction. In a recent HBR webinar, Adam Brotman (ex–Chief Digital Officer at Starbucks) and Andy Sack (tech entrepreneur) argued that leaders who wait to adapt risk falling behind brands already using AI to personalize, predict, and scale experiences at unprecedented speed.
Why it matters:
Customer expectations are shifting faster than most teams can react.
AI enables personalization so granular it reshapes what “knowing your customer” even means.
The brands moving first are setting the new benchmarks for engagement.
State of play:
Insights from Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and Reid Hoffman reveal a consensus: AI will upend customer relationships.
Early adopters are redesigning jobs, re-skilling teams, and mapping AI into every stage of the journey.
CX strategies are moving from static touchpoints to real-time, adaptive interactions.
The takeaway: The window for experimentation is closing. In an AI-first era, your competitive advantage will hinge on how quickly you can reimagine, not just improve, the experience you deliver.
🔗 Watch the Webinar→ HBR
When Intelligence Has No Limits
Ray Kurzweil, Google futurist and author of The Singularity Is Nearer, hasn’t moved an inch on his famous forecast: human-level AI by 2029 and a full human–machine merge by 2045. He sees nanobots in our brains, cloud-connected cognition, and digital immortality as inevitabilities — and he’s betting the customer experience of the future will run on intelligence that blends human empathy with machine speed.
Why it matters for CX:
Kurzweil’s timelines suggest the tools CX leaders use today will feel primitive within a decade.
Brain–cloud integration could make “knowing your customer” literal — instant recall of every interaction, preference, and sentiment.
The next wave of AI will solve current weaknesses like hallucinations and shallow reasoning, opening doors to trustable, emotionally aware automation.
State of play:
Price-performance in computing is doubling every 15 months, driving LLM leaps.
By 2029, Kurzweil says AI will match the best humans across most skills — including social interaction and contextual memory.
He predicts the shift will mirror mobile adoption: expensive and clunky early, ubiquitous and indispensable later.
The CX takeaway: If his track record holds, CX leaders have less than five years to rethink journey design, data ethics, and AI governance before the customer–brand relationship is redefined by always-on, human-machine hybrids.
🔗 Go Deeper: The Guardian
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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