Feature
The Gist
- From brand-side builder to service-side bridge. Trish Wethman’s move from practitioner leadership into a services role gives her a rare, full-spectrum view of how CX strategy actually gets executed — and where it breaks down.
- Action beats measurement theater. Across her CMSWire contributions, Wethman consistently pushes CX leaders beyond metrics debates toward what matters most: what organizations do with what customers tell them.
- People remain the CX multiplier. Even as AI accelerates, Wethman argues the real unlock is empowering frontline employees to deliver meaningful, memorable moments — not replacing them.
Few customer experience leaders have the benefit of seeing the same problems from both sides of the table. In 2025, Trish Wethman brought that perspective to CMSWire with clarity and conviction — shaped by years leading CX from inside large organizations and sharpened further by her move into a services role.
As chief experience officer at Pontem Tech Partners, Wethman now works directly with organizations trying to close the gap between experience strategy and technology execution. That vantage point — spanning brand realities, technology complexity and frontline impact — consistently showed up in her writing and conversations, making her a clear CMSWire Contributor of the Year for 2025.
Editor’s note: Wethman is one of the 2025's contributors of the year. Her contributions stood out not because they chased trends, but because they grounded them. She brought practitioner credibility, service-side honesty and a steady insistence that CX only matters if it changes outcomes for customers and employees alike.
Table of Contents
- The Throughline in Wethman’s Thinking on Customer Experience
- Where She Pushes Back on the CX Narrative
- Why Frontline Employees Remain Central
- What She’s Bringing Forward in Customer Experience Into 2026
The Throughline in Wethman’s Thinking on Customer Experience
Across her CMSWire columns and conversations, Wethman returns to one core idea: customer experience is moving faster than organizations are prepared to manage. As she puts it, “the velocity of change within the customer experience and and frankly experience management world right now, it’s hard to fathom.” What once felt episodic now feels constant. “Change is the new normal. Change is the new experience.”
That pace is exactly why Wethman resists framing CX as a single function or metric. Instead, she describes experience as a system that only works when its parts move together. “Experience is the three-legged stool in my mind,” she says. “You’ve got to think about the customer, you got to think about change and how you’re managing it, but you’ve also got people that are center to everything that we’re doing.”
This systems view reflects her own transition in 2025 — from leading CX inside organizations to helping them navigate complexity from the outside. At Pontem, she focuses on “bridging those gaps between the experience and the technology,” ensuring IT and CX teams are aligned on decisions, investments and outcomes.
Related Article: Why 2026 CX Will Look Nothing Like Today
Where She Pushes Back on the CX Narrative
One of Wethman’s most consistent challenges to the CX community centers on its fixation with metrics. While she acknowledges their importance, she is direct about their limits. “It’s not about the folder of research," she said, harkening back to a scene from "Mad Men" and her column about it. "It’s not about the number that you have on a spreadsheet or on a PowerPoint,” she says.
Instead, she frames CX maturity around follow-through. “It’s about customers told us this for our business. It means this and this is what we did.” In her view, any CX leader who fails to translate insight into action risks becoming irrelevant. “Any CX leader that is not taking what they’re learning and creating action within the business is not going to be a CX leader for very long.”
This stance cuts through perennial debates — including those around Net Promoter Score (NPS) — by reframing the question. The issue is not whether a metric is right or wrong, but whether it leads to decisions that improve real customer and employee experiences.
Why Frontline Employees Remain Central
While much of the CX conversation in 2025 centered on automation and AI, Wethman consistently redirected attention back to people. For consumer-facing brands in particular, she argues that frontline employees are where reputations are made — and unmade.
“Those people are the ones that are going to cause your brand to go viral,” she says. Customers may appreciate efficiency, but they talk about human interactions. The opportunity, in Wethman’s view, is not choosing between technology and people, but combining them. “I am not anti-technology at all. I think AI is going to supercharge what we are trying to do and it is going to free up those frontline people to really solve problems, which is what we want them to be doing.”
That framing shows up repeatedly in her CMSWire work: AI as an enabler, not a substitute; automation as a way to elevate human judgment, not sidestep it.
Trish Wethman's 2025 CMSWire Contributions
These articles illustrate the themes, perspectives and CX leadership principles that defined Trish Wethman’s contributions to CMSWire in 2025.
| Article | Core Thesis | What CX Leaders Need to Do |
|---|---|---|
| What “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” Teaches Us About CX in 2025 | CX professionals can find meaningful progress and deeper alignment by prioritizing gratitude, creativity and human connection amid a noisy experience landscape. | Foster reflection on wins and challenges alike; leverage empathy and cross-functional collaboration to turn insight into organizational influence. |
| Not Your Grandparents’ Customer Journey | Customer journey maps must evolve from static artifacts into dynamic, data-informed understandings that reflect real behavior across channels. | Invest in journey intelligence tools, real-time data flows and adaptive approaches that balance AI insights with human empathy. |
| Chief Customer Officer Challenges: From “Mean Girls” Politics to Real CX Power | Chief Customer Officers often struggle for clarity, authority and measurable influence in the C-Suite; the role is paradoxically essential yet underresourced. | Align customer outcomes with financial metrics, clarify CX ownership across functions and build credibility through early wins and influence, not authority alone. |
| Customers and Tech Overload: Okay, Boomer? | The proliferation of tools and touchpoints can overwhelm both customers and teams; tech fatigue is real without meaningful prioritization. | Cut complexity by rationalizing tech stacks, define clear use cases for AI and orchestration and focus on tools that reduce friction and enhance meaningful interactions. |
| Your Gut Is Not a Strategy: Rethinking Customer Understanding | Intuition alone isn’t a strategy; leaders must rely on structured data and evidence while contextualizing insights with human understanding. | Combine quantitative signals with qualitative context, validate assumptions with real feedback and build repeatable frameworks for customer understanding. |
| Stop Calling Customer Service ‘Customer Experience’ | Treating customer service as synonymous with CX misreads the scope of the discipline and limits leadership impact. | Expand CX ownership beyond service touchpoints to include strategy, design, data, marketing and organizational alignment — making CX holistic, not siloed. |
What She’s Bringing Forward in Customer Experience Into 2026
Looking ahead, Wethman’s focus remains practical. Rather than speculating about distant futures, she wants to surface what leaders are actually facing — and overcoming — inside their organizations.
“For me the stuff that gets me excited is hearing a leader talk about a challenge that they have overcome through people process or technology,” she says.
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She points to continued AI adoption, cross-functional alignment and deeper collaboration with frontline teams as themes that will persist. And while metrics debates will continue, her lens remains steady: “At the end of the day, it’s always going to come back to it’s not the number, it’s what’s driving the number.”
