Feature
The Gist
- Agent experience became the CX litmus test in 2025. Across analyst research, enterprise interviews and frontline case studies, it became clear that customer experience outcomes rise or fall based on how well organizations support the people delivering them.
- AI’s value was judged by its human impact. The most credible CX stories of the year focused less on automation speed and more on whether technology reduced friction, burnout and cognitive load for agents.
- Metrics finally faced real scrutiny. Efficiency KPIs gave way to deeper questions about whether organizations are measuring the right things — for customers and employees alike.
Customer service leaders in 2025: AI's changing the game. Even Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO himself, told us this month about AI in the enterprise: "Customer support is doing great."
Then, there is Reddit's "Horror-Dot-2989," a contact center agent who posted on Dec. 26, five days before we close the books on 2025:
"Today was Hell!!!. A lot of my coworkers called off today. The calls came nonstop. Today was one of those days. Funnily enough, the higher-ups who told us that we had to work a certain number of hours today called off, lol. I'm just happy I was able to work less today, given that I did some hours yesterday, but the hours I did today felt like forever."
"Also, just randomly, how does someone even make friends with coworkers in this line of work when it's literally revolving doors? The coworker I talked to 3 days ago just quit. In my department, people are just quitting randomly, now I have to take wayyyy more calls."
Table of Contents
- The Ultimate 2025 Paradox: Scintillating Innovation, Unhappy Contact Center Agents
- What 2025 Taught CX Leaders About Agent Experience
- AI Delivered Gains — and Raised the Stakes
- Why AI Forces a Rethink of Agent Metrics
- What Agent-Centered Design Looks Like in Practice
- Technology Isn’t the Answer — Context Is
- From Survey Fatigue to Signal Clarity
- Agent Experience Breaks When Culture and Metrics Fall Behind
- Why Context — Not Automation — Is the Attrition Fix
- Voices of CX in 2025
- NiCE Bets Its Brand on Agentic AI — and Agent Experience
- CMSWire’s Top 10 Customer Experience Articles of 2025
- What the State of Digital CX Ultimately Reveals
The Ultimate 2025 Paradox: Scintillating Innovation, Unhappy Contact Center Agents
Talk about a paradox in this space. The AI innovation is there. CX leaders care about agent experience.
The agents? They're not entirely happy just yet.
By the end of 2025, one truth cut through the noise around AI, platforms and digital transformation: agent experience is the bottom line.
I've traveled across the country for the last two years attending conferences with some of the best customer service and support providers and practitioners in the business.
One thing is abundantly clear: They all care about agent experience. Deeply.
But, no, they haven't solved the problem. Many agents still don't have a great employee experience, and they leave their jobs at a turnover rate as high as 60%.
Will this change in 2026? Will AI spurt a boon in ASR: Agent Smile Rate? Will "Horror-Dot-2989" get to keep a few co-worker friends for more than a few weeks?
Customer experience leaders spent the year debating personalization, agentic AI and automation at scale. But the most resonant CMSWire reporting — and the most engaged readership — centered on a more fundamental question:
If technology isn’t meaningfully improving life for frontline agents, does any of it actually matter?
Across CMSWire’s 2025 coverage, that question increasingly determined which CX strategies felt credible — and which quietly stalled.
What 2025 Taught CX Leaders About Agent Experience
Throughout the year, CMSWire spoke with analysts, enterprise CX leaders and contact center practitioners who arrived at the same conclusion from very different environments:
Efficiency alone is no longer a viable customer experience (CX) strategy.
As AI compressed workflows and accelerated interactions, pressure on frontline employees intensified. The industry’s focus shifted from “How fast can we go?” to “What happens to agents when everything speeds up?”
"I hate to say, but employees will likely prefer the AI vs. slanted evaluators who may perceive things differently call to call," one Reddit commenter, "be_just_this," posted on a thread about how long it will take for AI to replace contact center agents.
Related Article: Will Your Agents Buy in to the $50B Conversational AI Market?
AI Delivered Gains — and Raised the Stakes
I heard a lot of tales about AI's infusion into customer service and support, which promises success. I heard a lot of stats this year. One of them came at the Genesys Xperience conference in Nashville in September. There, I learned that according to Omdia’s State of Digital Customer Experience 2025 report, AI-powered automation is already delivering measurable improvements inside contact centers:
- 46% report faster post-call wrap-up
- 40% see improved issue resolution
- 38% cite boosted agent productivity
- 33% say it reduces repetitive tasks
- 26% say it improves job satisfaction and engagement
- 25% experience higher agent retention
Among organizations that say AI is delivering significant value, 50% report that it reduces routine tasks, allowing agents to focus on more complex customer queries.
Time to Measure Burnout for Contact Center Agents?
But as Mila D’Antonio, principal analyst on Omdia’s customer engagement team, emphasized in conversation with CMSWire, those productivity gains raise a harder question: what replaces the time AI removes?
D’Antonio noted that many contact centers continue to rely on efficiency-based KPIs, even as AI fundamentally changes the nature of agent work.
“I think many contact centers are still using efficiency-based metrics to measure how fast you do your job,” she said. “I think they really need to incorporate CX-focused metrics.”
She also questioned whether rising productivity figures mask hidden costs.
As routine work disappears, agents are increasingly left with emotionally complex, high-stakes interactions — without the natural pauses that once helped manage cognitive load.
That dynamic explains why 2025 saw growing concern around burnout, stress and job sustainability — even as performance metrics improved.
I do think the vendors have to go one step further. How are they measuring true employee wellbeing? They have greater productivity, but does that mean they're being given increased amount of calls? Companies say that's not happening, but I'm hearing that is happening. That can create burnout. So maybe we need to introduce metrics that measure stress and burnout and cognitive load.
- Mila D'Antonio, principal analyst
Omdia
Why AI Forces a Rethink of Agent Metrics
Rebecca Wettemann, principal analyst at Valoir, argues that AI has quietly broken many of the metrics contact centers still rely on — and agent experience is paying the price.
“We’re still looking at the wrong metrics,” Wettemann said. “We’re giving agents AI that accelerates everything they do ... but we’re still measuring them on things like average handle time and first call resolution.”
As AI compresses tasks such as call summarization, categorization and microlearning, Wettemann warned that agents lose the natural pauses that once helped regulate stress and workload.
“Those Zen moments an agent used to have are being compressed,” she said. “Agents are more likely to burn out.”
The irony, she noted, is that AI now makes it possible to measure what actually matters — agent energy, confidence and sentiment — in real time.
“I can pinpoint somebody that’s at a burnout point and needs 20 minutes for a coffee,” Wettemann said. “Or someone that’s had a bad day — and do coaching in a way that doesn't feel like it's mistake-driven, but much more growth-driven."
Wettemann emphasized that this isn’t about abandoning metrics — it’s about using them as leading indicators of sustainable performance.
“Metrics are leading indicators of the key things that I’m looking for,” she said. “Am I making more money? Are my agents more productive? Are operations more efficient? Does agent experience and agent sentiment get me toward that? Absolutely. Do I need to be able to track that correlation? Absolutely.”
Without that shift, she warned, AI risks turning agents into throughput engines — faster, but more expendable.
What Agent-Centered Design Looks Like in Practice
While at the Genesys conference, we caught up with a few practitioners to discuss agent experience and what's working in customer service and support:
Lighthouse Works: Designing for Ability, Not Accommodation
One of the most compelling agent experience stories CMSWire encountered in 2025 came from Lighthouse Works, a social enterprise contact center where roughly 70% of agents are blind or visually impaired.
Kaleb Stunkard, president and CEO of Lighthouse Works, explained that early success came not from mission-driven storytelling, but from operational clarity.
“We learned early on we have to lead with value, performance and quality,” Stunkard said. “Once customers understand that, they're all in, and the mission becomes the cherry on top.”
Lighthouse Works invested heavily in agent experience by building its own accessible agent interface — Equivista — on top of the Genesys platform, removing usability barriers that previously limited agent autonomy.
“When agents see how much work and effort we put in to remove barriers,” Stunkard said, that translates directly to the customer experience.
The result: extremely low attrition, strong first-call resolution and a workforce capable of handling complex, empathy-driven interactions — not because of charity, but because the environment was designed for success.
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Global Payments: Listening to Agents at Scale
At Global Payments, agent experience surfaced during a multi-year internal CX study tied to its 2025 transformation initiative.
Beth Granberry, senior director of communications platform services, described a research process that included call reviews, agent interviews and structured workshops across four cohorts.
One finding stood out: agents lacked access to the information they needed to resolve customer issues — particularly around fees and contract terms.
“They did not have the information they needed to truly address those issues,” Granberry said. “And so we had dissatisfied clients.”
Mackenzie Eisen, senior manager of communications platform services and a former contact center agent, highlighted another reality: fragmentation.
“We would do side-by-sides with the agents, just to experience what it looked like," she said. "And I was blown away." Why? They were using 20 and 30 applications on their desktop to service one call.
The takeaway was not that agents needed to work harder — but that systems needed to work better.
M&T Bank: Why Manager Effectiveness Became the Real CX Multiplier
For Justin Poser, EVP of enterprise customer contact strategy at M&T Bank, improving agent experience meant first confronting organizational fragmentation.
When Poser took on the role, the bank operated roughly 20 separate contact centers supported by more than 350 phone numbers — a structure that complicated both customer journeys and employee workflows.
“What got us to where we were wasn’t going to get us to where we needed to be in the future,” Poser said.
M&T consolidated its contact operations, reduced complexity and implemented a unified Genesys cloud platform — but Poser emphasized that technology alone wasn’t the breakthrough. The real shift came from re-centering the strategy on employee experience.
“One of the first things in our vision was that employee experience drives customer experience,” he said.
That belief reshaped leadership priorities. Poser created dedicated leadership roles focused on culture, learning and development, and embedded them directly into the contact center organization. The result was measurable change.
Less than 25% of agents previously had development plans. As of late summer, more than 90% did. Manager effectiveness scores exceed 90%, and engagement scores have climbed across teams.
That foundation has to be resilient, Poser said. It can’t depend on one leader or one moment.
Nowhere was that more evident than in the manager-agent relationship. Poser described frontline managers as the highest leverage point in the contact center — and often the most strained.
For many of their managers, it’s their first leadership role, he said. You have to spend even more time with them — development plans, mentorship, real support.
To reinforce trust, M&T expanded listening sessions, roundtables and open Q&A forums — even when leaders worried transparency might feel uncomfortable.
“It’s also risky not to do it,” Poser said. “When you have thousands of people on the phones ... you recognize that in certain moments you're going to get something that's a little bit uncomfortable. But it also sets the tone for a level of on the team. ... It's not a one-way scripted message where we're just blasting it up to you."
AI, he added, has delivered its biggest gains not directly to customers, but to agents and managers. AI coaching tools now analyze 100% of calls, replacing surprise-based feedback with shared visibility.
The banker sees the same dashboard the manager sees, Poser said. That transparency builds trust — and turns coaching into collaboration.
Perhaps most telling, Poser said agents consistently ask for one thing above all else: context.
“They want to feel smart. They want to feel informed,” he said. They want to help customers — and it’s frustrating when they don’t have visibility into the full relationship.
For M&T, enabling that visibility is no longer viewed as a CX enhancement — but as a requirement for agent confidence, credibility and retention.
Technology Isn’t the Answer — Context Is
Across CMSWire’s 2025 reporting, one pattern emerged consistently: agent frustration rarely stemmed from lack of capability. It stemmed from lack of context.
Whether at Global Payments, Lighthouse Works or large enterprise environments covered throughout the year, agents wanted the same thing:
- A clear view of customer history
- Fewer systems and screens
- Metrics that reflect the reality of their work
This theme also surfaced in coverage of vendor news and conferences, such as Medallia’s leadership changes and strategic repositioning, where renewed emphasis on actionable insight — not just measurement — signaled a broader industry shift.
From Survey Fatigue to Signal Clarity
Another thread that consistently surfaced in CMSWire’s 2025 reporting was growing frustration with traditional CX measurement itself.
In conversations around Medallia’s evolving strategy, leaders described a clear shift away from over-reliance on post-interaction surveys and lagging indicators — toward a model that captures experience signals continuously, across customers and employees.
The problem wasn’t that surveys are useless. It’s that they arrive too late and explain too little, especially in environments where AI is reshaping agent workflows in real time.
As AI automates summarization, routing and follow-ups, organizations generate massive volumes of behavioral data during interactions — tone, friction points, resolution paths and effort indicators. Medallia’s repositioning reflected a belief that these signals provide a more honest picture of experience than episodic surveys ever could.
That shift has direct implications for agent experience.
Rather than measuring agents primarily on outcomes customers report after the fact, leaders increasingly want visibility into what happens during the interaction — where agents struggle, where systems fail them and where coaching or design changes can reduce friction before it turns into burnout.
In that context, experience management becomes less about collecting opinions and more about diagnosing conditions. The goal isn’t just better scores — it’s earlier insight into stress, complexity and performance risk across frontline teams.
For CX leaders, the message was consistent: if experience measurement doesn’t help agents do better work — or help managers intervene sooner — it’s no longer fit for purpose.
Related Article: Your Customers Aren't Quiet — They've Given Up on Your Surveys
Agent Experience Breaks When Culture and Metrics Fall Behind
Throughout 2025, CMSWire repeatedly heard that agent frustration isn’t rooted in technology gaps alone — it’s rooted in how organizations choose to measure and manage frontline work.
Nate Brown, head of education and enablement at Metric Sherpa and co-founder of CX Accelerator, framed the problem as a leadership failure as much as a systems one.
Brown, catching up with us in September in Nashville at the Genesys conference, described how many organizations still approach customer service as a cost center to be optimized, rather than an experience to be elevated — even as cloud platforms and AI finally make that elevation possible.
“How do we truly elevate experiences for the customer, generate goal-oriented outcomes?” Brown said. “Let some of these silos fizzle out and do something better, something smarter.”
In conversations with contact center practitioners, Brown observed a growing divide between organizations stuck in half-implemented legacy systems and those making decisive leaps to cloud-based platforms.
“There’s almost this funny advantage to late adopters,” he said. “They’re not caught in the middle of these half-hearted technology implementations.”
That clarity, he noted, is finally unlocking meaningful AI adoption — not experimentation for its own sake, but tools that reduce friction for agents and customers alike.
But Brown warned that without cultural change, even the best technology will fail frontline teams.
“Prove to me that you care about me,” he said, speaking from his own experience as a former agent. “And then prove it through the metrics in the way that I’m being held accountable.”
He pointed to performance management as the breaking point. When agents are still judged primarily on average handle time or adherence, AI simply compresses work without reducing emotional or cognitive load.
“If you’re still stuck in that mode trying to get them off the phone instead of trying to solve the problem,” Brown said, “there’s no way I can do this job well.”
For Brown, the promise of AI lies in restoring respect and balance to agent-customer interactions — ensuring agents only engage when context, data and routing make the interaction worthwhile.
2025 Major CX, Contact Center and AI Platform News in 2025
A snapshot of CMSWire's news coverage of the deals, launches and platform shifts that shaped CX, agent experience and enterprise AI strategy, in order of reader engagement.
| Date | Article | Why It Matters for CX Leaders |
|---|---|---|
| Oct. 6 | Qualtrics to Buy Press Ganey Forsta for $6.75 Billion | Signals consolidation in experience measurement as vendors race to unify customer, employee and patient data. |
| Aug. 25 | Thoma Bravo to Acquire Call Center Provider Verint Systems for $2 Billion | Private equity doubles down on contact center analytics and workforce optimization as AI reshapes agent work. |
| Sept. 9 | Genesys Turns Up the Volume on Agentic AI in Music City | Illustrates how agentic AI is moving from concept to operational reality inside large contact centers. |
| June 5 | HubSpot Launches First CRM Deep Research Connector to ChatGPT | Marks a shift toward AI systems that can reason across CRM data, not just summarize it. |
| May 14 | Press Ganey Forsta Acquires InMoment to Expand CX Intelligence Capabilities | Highlights the growing demand for richer, multi-source experience intelligence beyond surveys. |
| July 29 | HubSpot Launches First CRM Connector for Anthropic’s Claude | Reinforces the rise of multi-model AI strategies inside enterprise CX platforms. |
| Sept. 23 | Medallia and Adobe Expand Partnership With AI Agent Integration | Signals tighter coupling between experience data and real-time orchestration across journeys. |
| Aug. 1 | Genesys Secures $1.5B Investment From Salesforce, ServiceNow | Validates the strategic importance of contact center platforms at the core of enterprise AI workflows. |
| Oct. 14 | Kustomer Unveils AI-Native CX Platform With Embedded Intelligence | Shows how CX platforms are being rebuilt with AI as the foundation, not an add-on. |
| July 15 | Cyara Launches AI-Powered CX Assurance Platform | Points to growing concern around testing, reliability and trust in AI-driven customer journeys. |
| Aug. 19 | Salesforce to Acquire Regrello for AI Workflow Automation | Highlights how workflow orchestration is becoming central to AI-powered CX execution. |
| April 30 | 8x8 Expands CX Platform With AI Messaging and Accessibility Upgrades | Shows how accessibility and AI messaging are converging as CX differentiators. |
| Sept. 24 | Alchemer Acquires Chatmeter to Unify Customer Feedback | Reflects demand for unified insight across reviews, surveys and location-based feedback. |
| May 6 | The Martech Supergraphic Has Grown Up — 15,000+ Solutions | Provides context for why CX leaders struggle with complexity — and why simplification matters. |
| June 16 | NiCE, Snowflake Partner to Unify CX Data Across the Enterprise | Underscores the role of data clouds in enabling real-time, agent-ready intelligence. |
| June 26 | Intuit Gets Conversational AI Agents to Tackle CRM, Finance and CX Tasks | Shows agentic AI expanding beyond service into core business operations. |
| Oct. 13 | PwC, Salesforce Launch AI-Powered Contact Center Solution | Highlights growing consulting influence in enterprise AI and CX execution. |
| June 17 | Can NiCE Hit the Jackpot With Agentic AI and New Brand Vision? | Explores how brand, platform strategy and agent experience are converging. |
| Oct. 22 | Tech Giants Back Uniphore’s $260M Series F for Enterprise AI Platform | Signals investor confidence in AI platforms built for regulated, high-stakes CX environments. |
| Aug. 28 | LivePerson, AWS Integrate Contact Center Solutions for CX | Reinforces hyperscaler influence on the future of conversational CX. |
| Aug. 7 | Kustomer Secures $30M to Advance AI-Native CX Platform | Shows continued momentum behind AI-first CX architectures. |
| June 25 | Tealium Launches CloudStream for Zero-Copy Data Orchestration | Highlights how zero-copy data is reshaping real-time CX personalization. |
| July 28 | NiCE to Acquire Cognigy for $955M to Advance AI-Powered CX Solutions | Signals aggressive investment in conversational AI and automation depth. |
| May 6 | Parloa Hits $1B Valuation, Signaling Agentic AI’s Rise in CX | Marks agentic AI as a serious, enterprise-scale CX category. |
| May 16 | NiCE Doubles Down on Agentic AI After Strong Q1 in the Cloud | Shows financial performance reinforcing strategic AI bets. |
| Oct. 15 | Twilio Adds Data Tools for Enterprise Customer Engagement | Highlights how messaging platforms are evolving into data-driven CX hubs. |
| Oct. 16 | Rokt, mParticle Launch Hybrid CDP on Snowflake AI Data Cloud | Shows CDPs adapting to composable, cloud-native CX architectures. |
| July 2 | RingCentral Launches AI Receptionist for Automated Call Handling | Demonstrates how AI is absorbing low-value interactions before they reach agents. |
Why Context — Not Automation — Is the Attrition Fix
When CMSWire spoke with Tony Bates, CEO of Genesys, the conversation around agent attrition landed quickly on a familiar theme: agents don’t need more features — they need fewer obstacles.
Bates pointed to a foundational issue that continues to undermine frontline work: fragmented interfaces. Before advanced AI capabilities can make a meaningful difference, agents need to operate from a single, consolidated workspace rather than juggling multiple pop-ups and disconnected systems.
From there, the next major unlock is access to customer history and context in real time. Bates emphasized to CMSWire in a September press conference that the most effective customer interactions — especially in emotionally charged situations — happen when agents understand where customers have been, not just why they’re calling now.
That visibility does more than improve resolution rates. It reduces friction, restores agent confidence and prevents interactions from becoming confrontational before they even begin.
"The best experiences I've had, whether it's with an airline or a return or an emotional situation, is when that person takes time to understand my history and my context," Bates told CMSWire. "We all know it, right? That's really what it is. And I think that's big unlock."
Bates also highlighted how predictive engagement can help close experience gaps that frustrate both customers and agents — such as when customers drop out of digital journeys and are forced to start over on another channel. Re-engaging customers in the same context, without repetition, removes unnecessary stress from the interaction.
Beyond workflow design, Bates discussed the importance of recognizing agent fatigue. He noted that AI-driven sentiment analysis can identify when frontline employees need a pause — not as a perk, but as a sustainability measure.
In his view, when organizations make agents feel supported — rather than monitored — those agents become stronger brand ambassadors. Technology doesn’t reduce attrition by accelerating work alone; it does so by making the work more humane.
Related Article: Genesys Turns Up the Volume on Agentic AI in Music City
Voices of CX in 2025
We caught up with some of the best CX leaders out there from global and US-based brands in our CMSWire TV Beyond the Call show. Here’s what they had to say:
Neil Gibson, Senior Vice President of Global Customer Experience at FedEx Services.
Sean O’Neal, Vice President of Retail Operations at The UPS Store
Wayne Simmons, Global Customer Excellence Lead at Pfizer
NiCE Bets Its Brand on Agentic AI — and Agent Experience
One customer service and support provider bet so big on AI in 2025, it rebranded to support it. NiCE’s rebrand wasn’t just cosmetic. It was a strategic signal that the company believes the next phase of customer experience will be defined by how well AI supports — rather than overwhelms — frontline employees.
At the center of that repositioning is agentic AI: systems designed not simply to automate tasks, but to act with intent, context and continuity across customer journeys. For NiCE, the promise isn’t faster resolution alone — it’s reducing the cognitive burden agents carry as interactions grow more complex.
The challenge NiCE is trying to solve is familiar across the contact center landscape. As organizations layer AI-driven routing, summarization and predictive engagement on top of existing workflows, agents often end up navigating more systems, not fewer. Automation accelerates the work — but doesn’t always simplify it.
NiCE’s new brand vision suggests a different ambition: AI that absorbs complexity behind the scenes so agents can focus on judgment, empathy and problem-solving. In that model, agentic AI becomes less about replacing human effort and more about coordinating it — ensuring the right information, next-best actions and customer context surface at the right moment.
The gamble is significant. Agentic AI raises expectations not just for performance gains, but for trust, transparency and explainability. If AI decisions feel opaque or misaligned with agent realities, the experience breaks down quickly.
“Brands are being very careful and frustratingly slow to adopt GenAI for direct customer facing apps (IVAs and chatbots),” Max Ball, principal analyst, Forrester, told CMSWire in June after NiCE's rebrand. “When I talk to brands one of the answers I get is fear/discomfort with the uncontrollable nature of GenAI apps. It's one thing to say, ‘This bot will always say this when answering this question.’ It's quite another to say, ‘Well, I'm not totally sure what it will say and while we have done everything we can do to reduce hallucinations to the point where we believe it is more reliable than a human agent, I can't guarantee there will be no mistakes.’”
Still, NiCE’s move reflects a broader industry realization echoed throughout CMSWire’s 2025 coverage: customer experience platforms are being judged less by feature velocity and more by whether agents actually feel empowered using them.
In that sense, the success of NiCE’s rebrand won’t be measured by awareness alone. It will be measured by whether agent experience improves in tangible ways — fewer screens, better context, smarter guidance and systems that work with agents instead of around them.
CMSWire’s Top 10 Customer Experience Articles of 2025
A snapshot of the reporting that shaped how CX leaders thought about agents, AI and the future of experience.
| Article | Theme | Author |
|---|---|---|
| Agentforce 3: Salesforce’s Latest Bet on the Future of Agentic AI | Agentic AI and frontline impact | Myles Suer |
| Better Data Means Better AI Across the Customer Journey | Data quality and agent enablement | Marcy Riordan |
| Hyatt’s CX Strategy: Where Standards Meet Personalization | Human-led service at scale | Dom Nicastro |
| Is This the Year AI Dominates the Call Center? | AI expectations vs. reality | Scott Clark |
| The Best CX and Marketing Events | CX leadership and community | Sheryl Hodge |
| A Tale of Two Countries: U.S. vs. Japan in CX and AI | Cultural context in experience design | John A. Goodman |
| Inside FedEx CX: Quality Culture and Digital-First Service | Operational CX and frontline culture | Dom Nicastro |
| Qualtrics to Buy Press Ganey Forsta | CX platforms and measurement | Dom Nicastro |
| Medallia Adds Former Qualtrics Executives | Leadership shifts in CX tech | Dom Nicastro |
| The Future of Customer Experience Metrics: Moving Beyond NPS | Rethinking CX and agent metrics | Jill Grozalsky Roberson |
What the State of Digital CX Ultimately Reveals
When CMSWire stepped back to assess the State of Digital Customer Experience 2025, one throughline surfaced again and again — not as a headline, but as an underlying truth.
Customer experience outcomes are increasingly determined by what happens inside the organization before an interaction ever reaches the customer.
The report highlights a widening gap between organizations that deploy digital tools to accelerate transactions and those that use them to support people — agents, managers and frontline teams — navigating more complex, emotionally charged customer moments.
As automation absorbed routine tasks, agents were left handling fewer interactions, but harder ones. More context. More emotion. More judgment required. The State of Digital CX report makes clear that this shift is structural, not temporary.
In that environment, agent experience becomes the pressure point.
Organizations that aligned digital investments with agent enablement — clearer workflows, better access to customer context, more realistic performance expectations — showed greater confidence in their CX strategies overall. Those that treated AI primarily as a throughput engine struggled to reconcile efficiency gains with rising stress and disengagement.
That perspective mirrors what CMSWire heard throughout the year from analysts, enterprise leaders and agents themselves.
Agent experience isn’t a downstream benefit of great customer experience. It’s the system that makes great customer experience possible — or impossible.
As CX leaders look ahead, the lesson from 2025 is straightforward but demanding:
If digital customer experience strategies don’t measurably improve life on the front lines, they will eventually undermine the very outcomes they’re meant to deliver.
The technology is ready. The data is available. The question now is whether organizations are willing to design customer experience with agents — not just customers — at the center.
