Interview
The Gist
- Digital CX tools are finally working. For the first time, 51% of organizations say their DCX technologies are actually delivering.
- Personalization jumps ahead. More than two-thirds now report having some form of personalization, a significant leap from past years.
- AI tops the priority list. AI and machine learning are the No. 1 investment for DCX teams, with 45% using generative AI for at least half their work.
- CMS investment surges. 82% of organizations plan to build, buy or upgrade their CMS in 2025.
- Behavior remains hard to track. Changing, complex and unpredictable customer behavior continues to challenge even mature organizations.
In this episode of CMSWire TV's The Digital Experience Show, CMSWire Editor-in-Chief Dom Nicastro chats with Sarah Kimmel, VP of Research at CMSWire, about the key findings from the CMSWire 2025 State of Digital Customer Experience report (access the report via the last section of the article).
Together, we explore what's changed — and what hasn’t — in digital CX maturity, personalization, AI adoption, CMS upgrades and the ongoing challenge of understanding unpredictable customer behavior.
Table of Contents
- Are Digital Customer Experience Tools Working Well?
- Do We Understand Customer Insights
- Personalization and AI: Getting Better and Better With Automation
- Unpredictable Customer Behavior
- Content Management Systems — What's Missing?
- AI Findings: Top Priority for DCX Teams
- Where to Get the State of Digital Customer Experience Report
Are Digital Customer Experience Tools Working Well?
Dom Nicastro: Editors do use this report very much because this is a core topic for us on CMSWire. We're covering digital customer experience trends all the time. It's really like the heartbeat of everything that we do really and so I thank you and your team for that for sure.
Dom Nicastro: So we are going to get into a little sneak peek because to get the full report you're going to want to get in and really dig in. But we are going to give you some key takeaways here—things that caught our eye—to give you a little sneak peek. So here we go.
No. 1: for the very first time, the majority of organizations feel that their actual digital customer experience technologies, you know, the things they need to do their jobs, are actually delivering the goods. So 51%, finally we got over that hump, are declaring that they're working well.
Sarah Kimmel: Right. And this has been kind of an agonizingly slow improvement. You know, in 2019, only 9% of the organizations that we surveyed said that their DCX tools were working well. And 50% of them in 2019 had not just like a, they're OK, but like, they're bad. Like they need work. We got to fix it.
Sarah Kimmel: I mean, obviously it's taken five years, but we have seen a gradual improvement in the digital customer experience tech stack overall in the market. People are really feeling like it's finally doing what they want it to be doing. And they're actually kind of getting that effectiveness and that impact out of the tools that they're looking for.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, it kind of makes sense to me that 51% is a good number. On the surface you think like only 51%? Because if I own a pizza joint and only half the people like it—my pizza—that's not cool. Like one out of every two people call you, this pizza stunk. But this makes sense because these leaders are really needing these tools to work for them.
Dom Nicastro: So I think a lot of times you get into the mistake of ... tool selection, it's not the right vendor for you. So it's actually on the practitioners too, I think, to kind of get to make sure these tools are working well by getting good vendors in the system to begin with.
Are Your DCX Tools Integrating Welll?
Sarah Kimmel: Right. And there is kind of a bewildering array of tools out there. And the challenges are kind of, you know, manifold. It's not just that there's a lot of tools and they all do different things. It's also how well do those tools work together or can you get those tools to work together? Can you not just be duplicating your effort all the time or duplicating your spend all the time?
Dom Nicastro: Yeah.
Sarah Kimmel: And then can you get that to work with your environment and with your business applications? And then there's the human side. Can you get it to work with your sales team and your marketing team and everything else? We have been kind of watching as at the beginning of the pandemic, we saw investment in these tools really went through the roof, right? Everybody was looking for ways to reach their customers on digital channels and ways to improve that experience.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah.
Sarah Kimmel: But what we didn't see was a corresponding increase in how effective that was. It has taken a very long time to work through all of the challenges necessary to implement these tools and get them sort of optimized for the experiences that organizations are trying to create.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, we were in that boat, remember? We had to pivot into virtual events. So we had to go through tool analysis. What's the best tool for us to give these webinars, give the Digital Experience Summit conference that we used to have? How do we transfer that into a virtual setting and provide a great experience? So we lived it for sure, 100%.
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Do We Understand Customer Insights
Dom Nicastro: Hey, let's get into the next sneak peek finding. So DCX teams—they're sending mixed messages about understanding customers, and I think that's an important thing, right, in their jobs. 41% tell us they understand them well and act on insights from tools, but at the same token, 49% say they have the tools but struggle to act on those insights.
Sarah Kimmel: Right. So here's one of those findings where I actually have a really positive spin to put on this. And that is that this is a huge leap forward from previous years on the percentage of organizations who say that they are understanding their customers' digital behavior. And in fact, it's almost doubled from last year. And it seems kind of weird to celebrate 41% of organizations saying that they understand their customers' digital behavior.
But for a while now, organizations have said, yeah, we have the tools in place, but we really struggle to act on what we find out or insights. We struggle to kind of see the signal through the noise, figure out what we should be doing, and how to better understand customers.
Dom Nicastro: Yay, we did it!
Sarah Kimmel: You could read this as a follow-on impact from the tech stack really starting to work well. So like step one is the tech stack finally gets sorted out, and step two is we really start to get those insights into customer behavior that we've been looking for. We've had all these tools, we've had this mountain of data, we haven't known what to do with it or what insights we can really draw from it. So one big thing—with the tech stack kind of moving over and improving—the needle on understanding customer behavior has also moved as well.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, I can totally relate to that as an editor. It's so fickle what's resonating out there. I mean, you look at data, like Google Analytics, for instance—you see the best performing article is a product listing page for a company that doesn't exist anymore. It's like, it's the internet. It's digital. It's always going to be. This doesn't really surprise me at all, that they're still having trouble understanding customers. I think digital is so fickle to begin with, and it's kind of flawed in that sense for sure.
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Personalization and AI: Getting Better and Better With Automation
Dom Nicastro: Now this ties into personalization—you know, so you need to understand your customers so you can personalize experience. So let's talk about that finding. Personalization in digital customer experience, it's on the rise. Just over two-thirds of organizations report having some kind of personalization in place, up from around half last year. That's a pretty significant growth there.
Sarah Kimmel: Yeah.
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Sarah Kimmel: Right, very significant, especially when you factor in that for the last three years, those increases have only been a couple of percentage points every year. So this is another area where we've seen really just agonizingly slow adoption and improvement is in the personalization space.
Sarah Kimmel: Two years ago, we did an analysis where we were desperate to figure out why—you know, like you say, everyone kind of needs personalization. It's so much more effective when you're personalizing for your customers. Why is it so slow? Why is this so difficult for organizations? So what we found was that it was twofold. The dependencies on how effective your personalization is are: one, do you understand your customers? Do you understand your customer behavior? And two, do you have the technologies in place to capitalize on that and to make those personalization journeys work?
Sarah Kimmel: And so as you can see from the other key findings, we see that the tech stack has finally improved a little bit. We see that understanding customer behavior has improved. So personalization is finally moving. These things are all dependent on each other. And so finally, finally, we're seeing that improvement in personalization in the market that we've been looking for and expecting to see for years now.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, let's not rule out the privacy aspect too, right? Because I think a lot of customers might not want that heavy-duty personalization. They might not be willing to give up a lot of their data with laws like GDPR and CCPA. But I think the brands are finally understanding how to work within those parameters of GDPR, CCPA and the privacy laws that are emerging now. I think the brands are getting better at that. That's probably one of the reasons why you see those personalization upticks for sure.
Sarah Kimmel: Right. We've also seen organizations kind of pushing the amount of personalization that customers want—pushing those decisions to the customers. Like, how much do you want? Because I have to tell you, I also don't want to have to input the same information like 10 different times in order to complete a purchase. You know, I want that to be streamlined as well. I don't want it to waste my time. But at the same time, obviously, I don't want them sharing that information with other organizations. So, yeah.
Dom Nicastro: Logins, logins. I want my login to be personalized permanently. I don't want to ever remember a login. So that's where I want to be targeted, right there. You get me upset if you take that away from me, for sure.
Unpredictable Customer Behavior
Dom Nicastro: Let's put some numbers around a thing we were talking about earlier—unpredictable behavior. So here we go. Now some hard data around this: DCX teams find it hard to understand customers’ digital behavior because it changes too quickly. There you go to my point earlier. 31%...
Dom Nicastro: And then it's too varied to model — 29%. Or they don't have the in-house expertise — 29%. So there's some struggles out there with this.
Sarah Kimmel: Yes. And because the kind of improvement in understanding customer behavior had been so slow in the market for several years, we got really curious. So this year we asked very specifically: What is it about understanding customer behavior that is really challenging for your organization? What's the roadblock here to getting a better understanding of customers' digital behavior?
Sarah Kimmel: And what they said is—these are kind of the top three, and everything after this was, eh, not quite as impactful—but yeah: customer behavior changing too quickly. It does make sense. We've seen big shifts in customer behavior toward digital, and then kind of a boomerang effect—everyone changed their behavior during the pandemic and now everyone’s kind of changing back or evolving into something else. Our preferences are changing.
Sarah Kimmel: What is normal to us has changed. Our expectations of what a great experience looks like have also changed. So organizations are kind of struggling to figure out: What is my customer journey? And if my customer journey keeps changing, then that's a big problem, right? You can’t really do traditional customer journey modeling if it’s in flux all the time. It’s just a really big challenge—or it's too varied to model.
Sarah Kimmel: One of the ways customer behavior is changing is that customers, when you get to that personalization level, want to do it their own way. You get lots and lots of different models. Who wants to keep track of ten different personas and make that work through your customer journey? The complexity becomes outrageous pretty quickly.
Sarah Kimmel: And then the other issue is that a lot of organizations don’t have the in-house expertise they need to keep up with understanding customer behavior or modeling what's going on or even keeping track of the data. It’s just a struggle. And we've seen budget issues come into play again this year. Not all organizations have the resources they need to stay on top of this.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah. It's also a struggle to identify that one key leader—who's in charge of determining and analyzing customer behavior? Are you going to IT for that because they understand the technology better? Is it the CMO? Should the CMO be in charge of that or is it too in the weeds for a CMO?
Sarah Kimmel: Right. It's a very strange place. It’s very interesting for me as a social scientist to take a look at data around this. Because when you look at the interplay between technology and human behavior, you're looking at two completely different domains of expertise, right?
Sarah Kimmel: One of them is: I understand people—I understand how people make decisions and what they want. That's the social side of digital customer experience. And then there's the technology side—the user experience: how do these technologies create that experience for the customer?
Sarah Kimmel: So you have these two completely separated domains of knowledge that have to come together to make this all work really well. And when you lean one way or the other too much, you start to run into trouble.
Dom Nicastro: Social scientist. I should introduce you as a social scientist. I want to be a social scientist. That sounds really cool. I think I'm going to say to my wife, “You know, I'm a social scientist. Part time anyway.” Let’s get into the—speaking of technology and those struggles...
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Content Management Systems — What's Missing?
Dom Nicastro: Let's get into CMS, because you know, a Forrester analyst said this years ago—that CMS is the backbone of digital experience. Whether that's still true or not, people might debate that. I think it certainly is. You need that centerpiece of content experiences, and CMS does that. They can say DXP—digital experience platform—however you want to call it.
Dom Nicastro: Content management systems are the core. And that's what I think a lot of marketing teams still go by. They say, “Hey, how’s the CMS doing?” I don’t think they say, “How’s the DXP doing?” But that’s just me. So the large majority of teams plan to invest in their CMS. In fact, 82%—that’s a big number—are planning to build, buy, or upgrade their platform. Is this like, the CMS is just not cutting it still?
Sarah Kimmel: Right. So if there was anything that super shocked me in the results this year, this was it. Because we did see a resurgence—like I said before—in how much of a challenge budgets were. And we’ve been seeing this all over. People have been tightening things up or trying to leverage AI to do a little bit more with less. Budgets have become a very big concern. So when I see that 82% of organizations are planning to invest in their CMS, I’m like—what is going on there?
Sarah Kimmel: A little more information: 30% say they’re building their own. So we’re seeing that move toward composable, right? People are really getting much more hands-on with the way that they’re putting together the different pieces of their DXP in a more composable or hybrid headless kind of a way. 29% are looking to buy a new CMS platform—which is wow, that’s a lot. And 23% say they’re planning to upgrade their existing CMS.
Sarah Kimmel: I think there are two things going on here. One is that organizations are highly motivated to integrate AI and machine learning into their stack. We've been seeing this huge movement over the last year or year and a half. And the next is that many of them have gotten better at understanding their customer journey and behavior. They're getting more comfortable acting on what they know. So they're finally really looking to acquire capabilities in their technologies that they haven’t used before.
Sarah Kimmel: So when they’re looking at their CMS and their upgrades, what they’re trying to do is get those more sophisticated capabilities—or to switch platforms because they want to do something else. Or they want to change up their platform because they really want to integrate AI into how they’re going to market.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, that’s a big number. To me that says only two out of 10 are happy with their CMS and not doing anything with it. So that’s a big wake-up call to the industry for better innovation. Or maybe it goes back to the practitioners to have better tool selection—knowing what you actually need in your org, with all these factors at play now that you mentioned like AI and different components like that.
Sarah Kimmel: Right. Yeah. I don’t think we’re seeing people being incredibly dissatisfied with their platform. I think they’re really looking for more—more capabilities, more sophistication, AI—just the ability to do things that they want to do, that now they can finally visualize. They can kind of see it now and they’re like, “That’s it. That’s what we need to do.”
AI Findings: Top Priority for DCX Teams
Dom Nicastro: Well, let’s go with one more finding, and we could not talk about findings without talking about AI. So here it is: AI—what’s one key finding? Just give me something, a little teaser for the report around AI and how it relates to DCX.
Sarah Kimmel: Okay. I'll give you two for the price of one. So first—AI and machine learning is the top investment priority for DCX teams. When we ask, “Hey, what are you investing in within your digital customer experience technologies?”—AI is number one. It’s never been number one before. So really just huge. When I say that people are really looking to get that AI into their CMS—they really want to. That’s where a lot of their focus is.
Sarah Kimmel: And then the next one is that generative AI has seen very widespread adoption among marketing and CX professionals. 45% of digital customer experience and marketing leaders in the survey say that they are using generative AI to support at least half of their work. So as budgets got tighter, CX teams have really been leaning on generative AI to close that gap in the work.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah. No surprises there. No surprises there whatsoever.
Where to Get the State of Digital Customer Experience Report
Dom Nicastro: Well, I think we've given enough of a sneak peek. There’s so much more in the report itself. It is a stunningly in-depth report. If you're a DCX leader, you’ve got to get it. Sarah, what else can you tell me about this report—how they can get it one more time, and anything exciting about CMSWire research in 2025?
Sarah Kimmel: Absolutely. You can get the State of the DCX Report for 2025 through the CMSWire website on the Research tab. Look for “State of DCX 2025,” and you’ll find it there (use DXSHOW discount code for 30% off). There will be a free download of the State of Digital Customer Experience executive summary available, and if you want the full report, we can link you through for purchase.
Sarah Kimmel: And then the other exciting thing—we have just published and updated our 2025 DXP Market Guide and our 2025 CDP Market Guide. So if you’re looking for a customer data platform or a digital experience platform, we’ve just published those market guides. You can find them—they have very, very in-depth vendor profiles, market overviews and some discussion of capabilities that you should be looking for in these technology platforms.
Dom Nicastro: Sarah Kimmel, VP of Research/Social Scientist at CMSWire. You’ve got to update that LinkedIn profile right now. Thank you for giving us these little sneak peeks and insights on the State of the DCX Report for CMSWire. We appreciate it very much. From the Digital Experience Show here, thanks for coming on.
Sarah Kimmel: Thanks for having me, Dom. Really appreciate it.
Dom Nicastro: Alright, we’ll see you soon—probably in Slack. Bye.
Sarah Kimmel: All right, bye bye.
