Who's Really in Charge of Your CX? (Hint: It’s Not You)
DCX Links | November 30, 2025
Welcome to the DCX weekly roundup of customer experience insights!
This week, the CX landscape sends a clear message: customer experience is being transformed by AI. Not just at the margins, but at the front lines.
From AI agents calling stores on your behalf to invisible diner profiling, the question is no longer if AI will shape your customers’ journey. The real question is how much control your brand is about to lose.
At the same time, trust is collapsing. Seventy-one percent of customers now say they trust companies less than they did a year ago.
But amid all the noise, a new kind of CX leader is emerging. These are data-savvy, results-driven professionals focused on outcomes over opinions. This issue connects the dots between trust, technology, and transformation.
Let’s get into it.
This week’s must-read links:
A New CX 50 List Spotlights the Doers, Not the Talkers
Google’s New AI Caller Dials Local Businesses for You
AI Shopping Heats Up, but Vertical Models Still Have the Edge
Restaurants Are Quietly Profiling Diners
71% of Customers Now Trust Companies Less Than a Year Ago
How Wendy’s Boosted Same-Store Sales 4% with a Frontline-Focused CX Overhaul
A New CX 50 List Spotlights the Doers, Not the Talkers
A new digital magazine published by the CXM Academy, showcases 50 CX leaders shaping the discipline in 2026. It’s a global mix of behavioral scientists, data storytellers, strategists, and operators. The through-line: these are practitioners focused on rigor, not noise.
What’s happening:
The free magazine includes 50 profiles, interviews, published authors, and evidence-based articles.
It spans brand, product, behavioral science, service design, transformation, and analytics.
Names include Steven van Belleghem, Rory Sutherland, Maxie Schmidt, Aarron Spinley, Bill Staikos, and many others across regions and industries.
Between the lines:
The FAQ makes a pointed case: CX has been dominated by conference voices and gurus, while real progress comes from practitioners doing unglamorous work.
The list celebrates people blending disciplines, breaking down silos, and challenging old CX myths with data.
It’s a signal that the industry is maturing. Expertise is shifting toward multidisciplinary leaders who pair creativity with business rigor.
The CX To-Do: Scan the list with your team. Identify three leaders whose work intersects with your priorities and follow their content for ongoing learning.
🔗 Go Deeper: CX50
Google’s New AI Caller Dials Local Businesses for You
Google rolled out an agentic calling feature that phones nearby stores on your behalf and returns a summary of availability, pricing, and discounts. It’s a small feature with big implications for how customers expect service to work.
What’s happening:
Search for a product with “near me,” select “Let Google call,” choose a few clarifying questions, and Google places the calls.
The system gathers information like inventory, pricing, and discounts across businesses.
A summary arrives by text, email, or both once the calls complete.
Between the lines:
This is a preview of how AI intermediaries will reshape local commerce and contact center behavior.
Brands lose control of the narrative if AI agents deliver inconsistent or outdated info.
CX leaders should prepare for a world where AI-to-business interactions become more common than human-to-business ones.
The CX To-Do: Audit your publicly available information weekly. If AI callers can’t get clear, consistent answers, customers won’t either.
🔗 Go Deeper: Google Blog
🔗Related: Google Shopping
AI Shopping Heats Up, but Vertical Models Still Have the Edge
OpenAI and Perplexity rolled out AI shopping assistants that help users research products, compare options, and even check out through Shopify or PayPal. The big question: will this crush niche AI shopping startups, or validate their strategy?
State of play:
ChatGPT and Perplexity now handle product discovery with conversational queries like “gaming laptop under 1000 dollars” or “cheaper version of this jacket.”
Startups like Phia, Daydream, and Onton build niche models trained on domain-specific datasets, arguing that general LLMs can’t match their depth.
Vertical players often create proprietary catalogs and merchandising logic, giving them sharper accuracy in fashion, interior design, and similar categories.
Between the lines:
The battle isn’t model vs. model. It’s data quality vs. data sprawl.
LLMs with massive traffic can onboard retail partners quickly, yet still struggle with subtle judgment that humans rely on when shopping.
If OpenAI and Perplexity drift toward paid placement, they may recreate the trust issues that plague search results today.
Why it matters for CX:
Holiday shopping is expected to see a 520 percent jump in AI-assisted purchases, pushing customer expectations far beyond basic search.
Customers want nuance, not generic results. Broad LLMs often return surface-level recommendations that miss context, emotion, and taste.
CX leaders should expect a new wave of shoppers whose first interaction with their brand may come through an AI intermediary, not a website.
🔗 Go Deeper: TechCrunch
Restaurants Are Quietly Profiling Diners
OpenTable is feeding restaurants new “AI assisted” insight tags built from your POS order history across other restaurants. It sounds small. It signals a much bigger shift: customer profiles built behind the scenes, without the customer realizing it.
What’s happening:
OpenTable is merging reservation data with POS histories from Toast, Epos, and others, creating behavioral tags like “red wine drinker,” “slow eater,” or “high spender.”
These tags follow diners across unrelated restaurants because the data links to an OpenTable account, not the venue.
State of play:
The tags are still in beta and only available to OpenTable Pro restaurants. Staff report they’re hit or miss, often inaccurate, and easy to misinterpret.
Diners can opt out, but the setting is hard to find. Most users won’t know this tagging exists.
Competitor Resy collects similar data but does not share POS insights across unrelated restaurant groups.
Between the lines:
AI is being used to categorize and cluster messy data, not to interpret individuals. That nuance disappears for the customer.
Misdirected tags can shape service behavior in unintended ways. A teetotaler flagged as a “cocktail lover” is one bad data join away from a poor experience.
This is the next frontier of CX trust: invisible personalization that customers never knowingly agreed to.
The CX To-Do: Review your own data flows. If your personalization depends on data the customer would be surprised to learn you collect, redesign the consent experience before trust becomes a liability.
🔗 Go Deeper: The Verge
DCX Stat of the Week
71% of customers now trust companies less than a year ago
Takeaway: Trust is in freefall. CX teams should treat trust as a core KPI and double down on the basics customers say earn it: fair pricing, consistent service quality, and visible protection of privacy and data.
🔗 Source: Salesforce – State of the AI Connected Customer, 7th Edition
🔗 MORE STATS: Daily Stats on Substack Notes
DCX Case Study of the Week
How Wendy’s Boosted Same-Store Sales 4% with a Frontline-Focused CX Overhaul
CX Challenge: Under-performing same-store sales at company-owned U.S. restaurants — the chain faced weak overall performance even though many individual restaurants struggled to deliver a consistent customer experience.
Action Taken: Wendy’s invested in customer experience improvements, specifically by rolling out new technology, updating training practices, and emphasizing hospitality at its company-owned locations.
Result: As a result of those CX efforts, company-owned U.S. restaurants achieved same-store sales that outperformed the systemwide average by 4%.
Lesson for CX Pros: Enhancing front-line execution — via training, better tools, and hospitality focus — can drive real revenue uplift, even when overall business conditions are weak. Small, consistent experience upgrades at scale can shift sales performance.
Quote: (from the company) — “initiatives focused on people, training and hospitality … caused these locations’ same-store sales to outperform the system by 4%.”
🔗 Further Reading: Wendy's Investor Relations
Have a case study to share? Reply and let me know!
🔚 Final Thought
AI is changing how customers interact, but it’s also making those interactions harder to trace. When people don’t know why they’re seeing something, they start to question everything. Trust erodes quietly, then disappears.
The mistake isn’t using automation. It’s assuming efficiency builds loyalty. It doesn’t. People remember being respected, not being rushed.
Some of the most effective CX work right now isn’t innovative. It’s honest. Clarity isn’t flashy, but it earns attention. Customers don’t need to be wowed. They need to feel like someone thought this through.
That’s how trust starts — not with surprise, but with sense.
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.
Facing a tough challenge? Reach out. Whether it’s strategy, team dynamics, or just feeling stuck — let’s talk it through.
Just want to say hey? Please do. I genuinely enjoy connecting with people who care about this work as much as I do.
No ego. No fluff. Just real conversations with real people trying to build better things.
DMs, emails, comments — they’re always open.
— Mark
www.marklevy.co
Follow me on Linkedin
✉️ Join 1,450+ CX leaders who stay ahead of the next customer curve.
Human-centered insights. Plug-and-play frameworks. Smart tools that actually work.
All designed for CX pros who want to build with purpose—and deliver with impact.
👉 Subscribe today and get the tools to elevate your strategy (and your sanity).