The CX Game Has Changed—Are You Still Playing by the Old Rules?
DCX Links | December 7, 2025
Welcome to the DCX weekly roundup of customer experience insights!
Customer experience used to be about optimizing what we could see: the interface, the journey, the brand touchpoints. But in 2025, the most important shifts are happening behind the curtain. AI models are influencing behavior in real time. Trust is formed or broken before a user ever clicks. Insight flows from systems, not surveys.
CX leaders today are no longer just improving the customer journey. They are rethinking how intent is expressed, how trust is earned, and how momentum is maintained.
What this moment demands is a new kind of clarity. You’re not just managing experiences anymore. You’re shaping how intelligence shows up for your customers, and how your brand earns the right to guide their next move.
Let’s get into it.
This week’s must-read links:
How AI Is Reshaping the Customer Experience Behind the Screen
The Hidden Trust Gap Undermining Online Shopping
The CMO Role Is Quietly Transforming Into Something Much Bigger
The Next Big CX Shift: AI Doing the Research You Don’t Have Time For
Executives Believe Loyalty is High, But Most Customers Disagree
PayPal — AI-Driven CX Overhaul that Boosted Engagement & Scalability
How AI Is Reshaping the Customer Experience Behind the Screen
I spent time with a piece from Adobe’s Ann Rich this week, and it hits on something every CX and product leader is feeling. The old two-way model of “user plus interface” is disappearing. AI has added a third participant that changes the conversation in ways our traditional design tools never planned for.
Why it matters:
Think about your own journeys. Where does intent fall apart because the model doesn’t behave the way the interface suggests it should?
Customers judge these workflows by output quality and how confidently they can move through the steps. Are you designing for that level of clarity?
If your team still works in a linear handoff model, you’re already behind. The interface and the model shape each other now.
What’s happening:
Adobe learned that subjective brand rules broke their generative validation. They had to rebuild interactions that helped users “make their brand objective” so models could honor it.
Designers are prototyping interfaces and model behavior at the same time because one influences the other.
Human-Model-Interface experiences are becoming the new reality. Does your team design with that triangle in mind?
The new model:
Ann lays out a simple structure that works across every generative workflow:
• Prompt: Help people express intent without making them work for it.
• Plan: Let them inspect the approach before the model runs.
• Show: Reveal steps, references, and reasoning so trust grows with each interaction.
• Next: Suggest meaningful actions that keep momentum alive.
The CX to-do: Pick one AI-powered journey and ask: Are we designing the interface, the model behavior, and the trust signals as a single system, or are we treating them like separate projects?
🔗 Go Deeper: Adobe
The Hidden Trust Gap Undermining Online Shopping
A recent Pew Research report states that a third of Americans say they’ve been scammed while shopping online. Think about what that means for anyone trying to build a smooth, trustworthy digital experience. Your customer shows up already on edge, already questioning whether what they’re seeing is real.
Why it matters:
If 36 percent of people have been burned, how confident do you think they feel when your checkout page loads?
Younger shoppers get hit hardest. Forty two percent of adults under 30 say they’ve been scammed. If you’re designing for Gen Z, are you accounting for that baseline skepticism?
Every past scam becomes part of the customer’s internal risk meter. You’re not just competing with other brands. You’re competing with their memory of a package that never showed up.
State of play:
The FTC logged more than 387,000 online shopping fraud cases last year. That’s almost half a million moments where someone’s trust shattered.
Losses hit 434 million dollars in 2024, with a median loss of 130 dollars. That’s enough pain to make someone think twice the next time they tap “Buy.”
Some groups carry heavier distrust than others. Hispanic and Black adults report far more scam experiences, which means your trust-building isn’t one size fits all.
Between the lines:
Most victims never report the scam. Seventy four percent stay silent. That means we’re only seeing the surface.
If you’re not actively designing for fear, you’re ignoring one of the biggest drivers of abandoned carts.
The CX to do: Look at your flow and ask one question: If someone walked in assuming you might trick them, what would you change? Clearer policies? Better delivery expectations? Stronger returns messaging? Start there.
🔗 Go Deeper: Pew Research
The CMO Role Is Quietly Transforming Into Something Much Bigger
There’s a shift happening in marketing leadership that deserves every CX leader’s attention. AI isn’t just giving teams new tools. It’s reshaping the CMO job into something far closer to a chief growth architect than a traditional brand storyteller.
Why it matters:
Think about your own company. Who else sits at the intersection of customer data, market signals, creative strategy, and revenue? No one has that combination the way marketing does.
When those signals flow in real time, someone needs to connect them to product, finance, supply chain, and CX. That’s where the AI-first CMO becomes the glue.
If marketing is still treated like a service function, the company stays stuck in pilot mode. This shift asks leaders to treat marketing as an enterprise growth engine.
State of play:
The AI-first CMO builds the martech backbone with the CTO, not to chase efficiency but to eliminate silos that hide demand signals.
The most advanced companies give marketing and IT shared control of AI operating models. That’s how they move faster than their competitors.
As data becomes connected across teams, marketing starts shaping everything from pricing to product to creative direction.
Questions leaders should be asking:
Can your CMO explain data flows with the same clarity as campaign strategy?
Are they building talent with the same urgency they’re building platforms?
Do they push the rest of the C-suite to rethink how growth actually works in an AI-first environment?
Are they protecting the creative soul of marketing even as automation scales?
The CX to do: Look at how growth decisions get made. If your CMO isn’t integrated into the engine of those decisions, you’re running yesterday’s model while your competitors build tomorrow’s.
🔗 Go Deeper: BCG
The Next Big CX Shift: AI Doing the Research You Don’t Have Time For
Anthropic just shared how their AI-powered interviewer actually works, and it’s one of the clearest signals yet of where customer insight is headed. If your team relies on interviews, voice of customer, or qualitative research, this model is worth paying attention to.
Why it matters:
Most teams can only interview a handful of customers at a time. What happens when you can run hundreds or thousands of structured conversations without losing depth?
Imagine having consistent rubrics, cleaner transcripts, faster turnaround times, and clearer patterns. How would that change your roadmap decisions?
The big shift: AI isn’t just analyzing feedback. It’s now collecting it with discipline, flexibility, and speed.
How the workflow actually works:
Planning: The system starts by building a full interview rubric. It creates questions, plans the flow, and aligns everything to core research goals. Humans step in to fine-tune the plan before interviews begin.
Interviewing: The AI then conducts 10–15 minute adaptive interviews on Claude.ai. It follows best practices, probes when needed, and adjusts based on the person’s responses. Every conversation stays aligned to the research goals while still feeling natural.
Analysis: Afterward, the AI works with researchers to break down transcripts, answer the original questions, and pull quotes. A second tool scans thousands of answers to uncover themes and how often they show up.
Questions to ask yourself:
What could your team learn if you weren’t limited by interview bandwidth?
Where would faster, deeper insight help you make bolder CX decisions?
Which parts of your research process feel slow or repetitive today?
The CX to do: Try this model in a small experiment. Let AI handle the structure and scale while your team focuses on interpretation, judgment, and action.
🔗 Go Deeper: Anthropic Research
DCX Stat of the Week
Executives Believe Loyalty is High, But Most Customers Disagree
DCX Stat: About nine out of 10 executives surveyed believe customer loyalty has grown in recent years, but only four in 10 consumers say the same.
Takeaway: This massive 50-point perception gap between leaders and customers highlights a critical blind spot that endangers retention and revenue. CX investments must be validated by measurable customer sentiment, not just internal optimism.
🔗 Source: PwC 2025 Customer Experience Survey
🔗 MORE STATS: Daily Stats on Substack Notes
DCX Case Study of the Week
PayPal — AI-Driven CX Overhaul that Boosted Engagement & Scalability
CX Challenge: PayPal’s global operations relied on subjective QA scoring, fragmented data, and inconsistent coaching. Analysts struggled with a legacy WFM system that couldn’t scale to 6,000+ employees, creating inefficiency, low satisfaction, and limited visibility into performance and compliance.
Action Taken: PayPal deployed NICE Enlighten, Interaction Analytics, and Quality Central to objectively score soft skills, detect behavior patterns, and tie coaching to sentiment drivers. IEX Workforce Management and Employee Engagement Manager replaced the legacy WFM, delivering forecasting accuracy, scheduling flexibility, and frontline self-service. Value Realization Services guided rollout, training, and adoption across 131 management units.
Result: One pilot cohort saw sentiment scores rise significantly within 10 weeks. Leaders now coach based on data instead of intuition, and agents respond positively to personalized feedback. Workforce analysts report fewer technical issues, stronger forecasting, and improved agility across remote and hybrid teams. Enlighten’s vulnerable customer models now support regulatory compliance in the UK and Australia.
Lesson for CX Pros: Standardizing CX around objective behavioral metrics—paired with modern WFM—creates lasting gains in sentiment, compliance, and operational efficiency at scale.
Quote: “We’re laying the foundation for a next-generation CX ecosystem that’s automated, adaptive, and always learning.” — Jared Shumway, PayPal
🔗 Further Reading: NICE
Have a case study to share? Reply and let me know!
🔚 Final Thought
This Isn’t Just a Shift. It’s a Rebuild.
The unifying idea across everything this week is alignment. Not just between teams, but between signals, systems, and expectations. Between what your customers experience and what your organization believes is working. Between the tools you use and the outcomes you actually need.
And alignment takes deliberate effort. It means asking new questions.
Are we designing journeys or behaviors?
Are we earning trust or assuming it?
Are we moving with speed, or just reacting faster?
The best CX leaders aren’t just using AI to automate. They are using it to connect the dots, uncover gaps, and rebuild smarter. They are designing systems that learn, adapt, and scale without losing the human element.
This is the real work. Not to polish what already exists, but to create the kind of experiences that could not exist until now.
Thank you!
If this edition sparked ideas, share it with a colleague or team member. Let’s grow the DCX community together!
👋 Let’s Talk
I didn’t create this newsletter to just push out ideas. I created it because I believe the people building experiences — the ones in the trenches, solving real problems — don’t get nearly enough space to think, reflect, and connect.
And if I’m honest… the part that matters most to me isn’t the writing. It’s you — the person reading it.
So if something in here resonated, challenged you, or even just made you pause — I’d love to hear from you.
Got feedback? Tell me what landed, what didn’t, or what you wish I’d cover next.
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— Mark
www.marklevy.co
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