Why CX Matters More Than Ever

Customer expectations are being re-shaped by digital-first behaviors, hyperpersonalization and growing demands for trust and empathy. In this dynamic landscape, Customer Experience (CX) has evolved from a service function into a boardroom priority, a strategic growth lever tied directly to revenue, retention and competitive positioning.

Research shows that companies prioritizing CX can double the revenue growth of companies that don’t.¹ Conversely, poor experiences are proving costly, with global sales losses projected to exceed USD 3.7 Trillion annually due to subpar CX.²

Forrester emphasizes that “customer obsession” must be institutionalized, woven into product design, digital interfaces and even back-office operations to deliver a truly unified experience.³ It finds that customer-obsessed companies are outpacing their peers with 41 percent faster revenue growth and 49 percent faster profit growth.⁴ Even incremental improvements matter: A one-point gain in Forrester’s CX Index has been shown to unlock up to USD 619 Million in additional revenue for retailers and hundreds of millions more across banking and insurance.

In 2025, CX is no longer the responsibility of a single department; it is a shared accountability across leadership, operations and digital touchpoints. According to McKinsey, CIOs are now expected to support all facets of customer experience, often leading the integration of tech infrastructure to drive CX transformation.⁵ In one example highlighted by McKinsey, a bank eliminated experience silos across divisions by empowering its CIO to orchestrate an end-to-end customer experience overhaul, reflecting a broader industry shift toward cross-functional CX ownership.

So, what does it take to build a CX framework that is not just future-ready but future-defining?

While optimal CX ecosystems differ across organizations and industries in scope, scale and strengths, the end goal for all should be the same: Enabling enterprises to engage with intelligence, empathy and measurable impact in every customer moment.

Building such frameworks requires a harmonized approach, one that blends data, automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and human ingenuity to orchestrate experiences that are both dynamic and deeply personal. It’s this philosophy that underpins the next generation of customer engagement models.

Generative AI: The Engine of Hyperpersonalized CX

Generative AI (Gen AI) is re-shaping how brands engage customers. Moving beyond traditional segmentation, organizations are now deploying Gen AI, analytics and automation to drive real-time, context-aware personalization, adjusting in the moment to customer behavior, sentiment and preferences.

For instance, a leading retail chain used Gen AI and a hybrid recommender system to tailor wine recommendations based on customer preferences and transaction patterns. In the travel sector, Gen AI-powered knowledge assistants are empowering customer care agents with instant, context-aware responses, drawing from complex airline and hospitality policy documents. This drastically reduces resolution time, improves agent productivity and enables accelerated service, transforming every interaction into an opportunity to build loyalty.

The power of such interactions cannot be understated. Research shows that a massive 81 percent of customers prefer companies that offer a personalized experience. 70 percent say it’s important to receive a personalized experience where the employees recognize them and understand their history with the company.⁶ CX leaders agree. In a recent Everest Group survey report on Gen AI in Customer Experience Management (CXM), supported by WNS, 55 percent of those surveyed believe that enabling personalization and customization of customer interactions was a key driver for Gen AI adoption.

Empathy at Scale: From Soft Skill to Performance Metric

Personalization alone is not enough. In an increasingly digital-first world, future-ready CX frameworks must exhibit empathy at scale – essentially humanizing digital touchpoints with emotional intelligence, ensuring customers feel seen and heard and that increased automation doesn’t erode the depth of engagement.

The commercial returns of doing so are significant. Data shows that a 5 percent increase in customer retention can boost profits by 25 percent to 95 percent, while customers who enjoy positive experiences are likely to spend 140 percent more and are likely to remain customers for five years longer than those with negative experiences.⁷ All of which makes empathy at scale a strategic imperative.

Embedding the right balance of human oversight and automation will prove integral as Gen AI adoption enters its second phase, retaining the human-in-the-loop to humanize crucial interactions. So too will enshrining empathy as a performance metric – not just a mindset – moving CX assessment beyond traditional Net Promoter Scores (NPS) to include elements like emotion detection.

Composable CX: Architecting for Modularity and Measurable ROI

In a digital-first world, agility is the new currency of CX. Gartner underscores the rise of composable CX architectures – modular, Application Programming Interface (API)-first platforms that allow enterprises to plug and play capabilities, experiment quickly and innovate without disrupting core systems.

This level of agility can ensure that frameworks can adapt in response to changing expectations, and can be achieved through bespoke integration of digital, data and human elements to suit enterprise needs. Crucially, intelligence should be democratized across the organization, unified through consistent, accessible experiences across channels for maximum impact.

Cloud customer experience management frameworks like EXPIRIUS enable this agility by unifying data, automation and omni-channel orchestration into one adaptable layer. They allow CX leaders to link initiatives directly to business outcomes, like CLV, retention or resolution time, offering visibility into both experience and ROI.

Partnering for Impact

The impact of hyperpersonalized, empathetic and measurable CX frameworks can prove transformative across industries. Successfully integrating such strategies, however, is no easy feat, requiring the development of robust capabilities in myriad areas, from technology and data to people and processes. It’s why many leading organizations are seeking to partner to quickly tap into the latest tools across these areas, unlocking instant impact in the process.

At WNS, we collaborate with clients across industries, harnessing our proven frameworks and deep domain excellence, to help them operationalize their CX vision.

Exactly what these partnerships look like will be dictated by industry-specific needs. Focusing on Gen AI deployment within CX showcases the differing spaces in which assistance is being sought. 62 percent of CX leaders are looking for support in building Gen AI solutions, 60 percent for integrating Gen AI solutions with existing tech and 58 percent for designing overall Gen AI adoption roadmaps.

Whatever the driving force, the right partnership can enable organizations to access the deep expertise required in designing and operationalizing future-ready CX frameworks – crucial to bridging the existing gap between intent to prioritize customer-centricity and execution.⁸

From Frameworks to Transformation Engines

Enterprises across industries can utilize various levers to construct scalable, real-time customer engagement models. Integrating Gen AI, predictive analytics, intelligent automation and omni-channel accessibility can be highly impactful, enabling organizations to nimbly orchestrate CX and exceed customer expectations.

However, this is only the beginning. From this position of strength, CX is poised to become a true transformation engine, with customer journeys emerging as cohesive, insight-driven experiences that can help enterprises dictate where to go next. Imagine, for instance, CX-led product innovation, where customers can co-create with the brands they love. Or an era where behavioral data is funneled back into operations to facilitate truly predictive CX.

Proven frameworks and visionary thinking are enabling CX leaders to not only stay ahead in a dynamic, customer-first world but also bring a new era of transformative CX to life.

At WNS, we co-create smarter businesses by helping enterprises design and operationalize future-ready CX frameworks that deliver intelligence, empathy and measurable impact.

To explore how you can turn customer experience into a transformation engine, connect with our CX experts or explore our CX solutions.

References

1. Achieving Growth: Putting Leadership Mindsets and Behaviors into Action | McKinsey & Company

2. Bad Customer Service Could Cost More Than $3.7 Trillion | Forbes

3. What is Customer Obsession and Why Does It Matter? | Forrester

4. Forrester’s 2024 US Customer Experience Index | Forrester

5. A New Dawn for the Technology Officer | McKinsey Digital

6. The Personalized Customer Experience: Consumers Want You to Know Them | Forbes

7. Valuable Experience: How Customer Experience Can Unlock Value in Private Equity | Deloitte

8. Achieving Growth: Putting Leadership Mindsets and Behaviors into Action | McKinsey & Company