DCX Links | February 23, 2025
Innovation or Extinction? The CX Shifts You Can’t Ignore
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Welcome to the DCX roundup of customer experience insights!
What if everything you thought was essential to your business—your processes, your tools, even your assumptions—became obsolete overnight? What if the biggest threats weren’t coming from competitors, but from the very innovations designed to help you?
This week, we’re exploring a shift that’s happening faster than most are prepared for. The rules are being rewritten, and those who don’t adapt will find themselves stuck in a world that no longer works the way they expect.
Some changes feel inevitable. Some feel unsettling. But the one thing you can’t afford to do? Ignore them.
Happy reading—and stay curious, DCXers!
-Mark
This week’s must-read links:
AI Is Eating Customer Support
Samsung’s Ballie: Your Tiny AI Butler or a Creepy Rolling Spy?
AI Just Killed Product Photography
The New York Times Is Betting on AI
The New Gold Standard for Customer Experience
Chick-fil-A’s Drive-Thru Playbook: Get a Bird’s Eye View—Literally
AI Is Eating Customer Support
Customer support as we know it? Dead. That’s the big takeaway from Intercom’s Transformation Framework Report—and if you’re still running support the old way, you’re already behind. Customers want instant answers, support teams are stretched thin, and AI is the only way forward.
The Intercom Playbook: Automate. Optimize. Empower.
Automate: AI handles the repetitive, soul-crushing questions.
Optimize: Smart routing + AI-assisted agents = faster, smarter resolutions.
Empower: Give your team real tools to focus on high-value customer problems.
Why this matters:
Support volumes are exploding. Budgets? Not so much. Intercom’s report is clear—AI isn’t a trend, it’s survival. The companies that use it right will win. The ones that don’t? They’ll drown in tickets and customer frustration.
The takeaway:
AI isn’t here to replace your team—it’s here to supercharge it. According to Intercom, the smartest brands are already making the shift. Are you?
Move now, or play catch-up later.
Samsung’s Ballie: Your Tiny AI Butler or a Creepy Rolling Spy?
Samsung just dropped Ballie, a pint-sized AI robot that rolls around your house like it owns the place. According to Samsung, it’s your new “AI companion”—but let’s be real, it’s basically a sentient Roomba that wants to run your life.
What Ballie thinks it’s doing:
Acting like a personal assistant, controlling your smart home gadgets.
Following you around like an overeager puppy, learning your routines.
Projecting videos and notifications on your walls (because screens are so last year?).
What it might actually be doing:
Judging your snack choices at midnight.
Reporting your couch naps to Big Tech.
Secretly plotting world domination, one roll at a time.
Why CX pros should care:
This is AI-driven hyper-personalization taken to the extreme. Customers are already expecting brands to anticipate their needs—Ballie is just a physical manifestation of that trend. If AI can adjust your lighting and order your groceries, why shouldn’t your business be just as intuitive and proactive?
The big question:
Is Ballie a brilliant innovation or the start of our inevitable AI overlord future? Either way, it’s rolling in whether we like it or not.
Would you let this little guy run your house?
AI Just Killed Product Photography
If you’re still paying photographers for e-commerce shoots, you’re officially old-school. Caspa’s AI-generated product photos are here, and they’re about to make traditional photography look like a fax machine.
Lights, Camera… Algorithm?
Instant visuals: AI whips up studio-quality images in minutes.
Unlimited test shots: New backgrounds, lighting, and angles—no reshoots required.
Budget-friendly brilliance: No more overpriced photographers or costly studio time.
Real or Rendered?
Caspa’s AI doesn’t just edit photos—it creates them from scratch. That means brands can ditch physical photoshoots altogether. And here’s the mic drop: If your competitors are churning out stunning, high-converting images at scale, and you’re still booking studio time, you’re toast.
CX Pros, Take Notes
High-quality visuals drive conversions. AI means faster testing, more personalization, and better sales. It’s not just replacing photographers—it’s rewriting how brands showcase products and capture customer attention.
The $1M Question
If AI can generate perfect product shots, what happens to photographers? More importantly—are you ready to embrace the future, or will you get left in the pixel dust?
Your move.
The New York Times Is Betting on AI
While media giants fight AI in court, The New York Times is building its own arsenal of AI tools—without handing the keys to OpenAI. Instead, it’s rolling out internal AI tech to help journalists with SEO, summaries, and even writing social media posts.
AI: Friend or Frenemy?
The Times is greenlighting AI for editing, brainstorming, and research, but drawing the line at:
Writing full articles
Handling confidential sources
Circumventing paywalls
Publishing AI-generated images or videos
They’re not handing storytelling over to machines—but they are leaning in where it counts.
The Big Pivot: Build, Don’t Buy
Rather than relying on ChatGPT, the Times is developing its own AI tools:
Echo, an in-house beta tool for article summarization
ChatExplorer, for internal research and analysis
A suite of AI programs, including GitHub Copilot and Google’s Vertex AI, to assist with coding and product development
What This Means for CX Pros
This is a masterclass in AI adoption—use it to enhance human talent, not replace it. The Times is keeping control while leveraging AI’s strengths. CX leaders should be asking: Are we using AI to assist and elevate, or are we resisting it altogether?
The Inevitable AI Culture Clash
Not everyone at the Times is thrilled. Some fear AI will dumb down headlines, introduce errors, and lead to lazy journalism. And let’s not forget—they’re still suing OpenAI for allegedly training on their content without permission.
So which version of AI wins? The one companies fight, or the one they own and control? The Times is making its bet. What’s yours?
Source
Related - A cautionary tale about the Washington Post
The New Gold Standard for Customer Experience
The shift: Bain & Company, in partnership with Kantar and Qualtrics, has unveiled the Global Standards for Customer Experience Teams 2025—a cross-industry playbook aimed at bringing consistency, structure, and real-world impact to CX practices.
Why it matters: The CX profession has long lacked a unified framework, making it hard for companies to measure success and improve systematically. These standards aim to set the bar for what great CX looks like across industries.
The Big Three: What the Standards Cover
Customer-Centric Culture: Aligning leadership, employee engagement, and internal purpose around CX.
CX Capabilities: Mastering feedback, data, and insights to drive better experiences.
CX Execution: Turning strategy into action through journey and lifecycle management.
What’s New?
Built on Bain’s CX Advance Framework, refined through global consultation.
55 standards covering leadership, feedback loops, data, and value management.
A commitment to ongoing updates so the standards stay relevant.
The Bottom Line
The 2025 CX Standards aren’t just guidelines—they’re a blueprint for companies looking to deliver best-in-class customer experiences. With a focus on clarity, accountability, and continuous improvement, this framework is designed to elevate CX from a practice to a core business strategy.
Want to see how your company measures up? Visit cx-standards.com and raise your own standards.
Source
Related - CX Patterns Podcast with Sam Stern
Chick-fil-A’s Drive-Thru Playbook: Get a Bird’s Eye View—Literally
Chick-fil-A isn’t just flipping chicken sandwiches—it’s reinventing the drive-thru. Faced with traffic jams, city complaints, and long wait times, the chain did what any logical company would do: it took to the skies.
The Drive-Thru Dilemma
By 2020, 60% of Chick-fil-A’s sales came from drive-thrus.
Success led to longer lines—8-minute wait times vs. the industry’s 6-minute standard.
Cities pushed back, denying expansion requests due to traffic chaos.
The Chicken That Learned to Fly
To fix the problem, Chick-fil-A literally got a new perspective:
Managers climbed onto rooftops to study drive-thru flow.
Drones recorded footage of operations.
AI-driven game film analysis (like pro sports teams use) identified inefficiencies.
The Result: Faster Than Ever
Last year, Chick-fil-A opened a drive-thru-only restaurant in Atlanta that moves twice as fast as its other locations. Meanwhile, some customers found their own hack—parking and walking inside to beat the line.
The Takeaway for CX Pros
Sometimes, solving big problems means changing your vantage point. If your process is slowing down, your customers are frustrated, or your business is growing too fast for its own good—step back (or climb up) and see things differently.
Or, in Chick-fil-A’s case, send in the drones.
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!
👋 Please Reach Out
I created this newsletter to help customer-obsessed pros like you deliver exceptional experiences and tackle challenges head-on. But honestly? The best part is connecting with awesome, like-minded people—just like you! 😊
Here’s how you can get involved:
Got feedback? Tell me what’s working, what’s not, or what you’d love to see next.
Stuck on something? Hit me up whether it’s a CX challenge, strategy question, or team issue—I’m here to help.
Just want to say hi? Seriously, don’t be shy. I’d love to connect, share ideas, or even swap success stories.
Your input keeps this newsletter fresh and valuable. Let’s start a conversation—email me, DM me, or comment anytime. I can’t wait to hear from you!
— Mark
www.marklevy.co
Follow me on Linkedin
📌🚀Grab a Copy: A CX Leader’s Guide to Organizational Buy-In
Ready to cultivate a customer-obsessed culture? A CX Leader’s Guide to Organizational Buy-In is your playbook for ensuring that every department—customer service, sales, product, tech, finance, HR, and beyond—puts customers at the center of everything it does.
Learn how to rally every department around customer obsession, click the button below to get started:
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