We built CX teams. So why is customer experience getting worse?

Over the past decade, most organizations created some version of a Customer Experience team. Chief Customer Officers appeared, journey maps covered walls, NPS became a boardroom metric, and companies invested heavily in understanding customers.

So why does dealing with so many companies feel worse?

Turns out it isn’t just me.

Forrester’s 2025 CX Index found that customer experience quality in both the US and Canada declined for the fourth consecutive year, reaching an all-time low. In the US, 25% of brands declined versus 7% that improved. In Canada, 18% declined and just 1% improved.

25%

of US brands declined

7%

of US brands improved

18%

of Canadian brands declined

1%

of Canadian brands improved

I don’t think companies suddenly stopped caring about customers. I think we treated customer experience as something a CX team could own, when the actual experience is created by the entire organization.

For me, there are three basic components of a great brand experience: Product. Service. Signature.

All three are becoming more important.

Product: good is becoming easier to find

You need a good product, but quality is increasingly democratized. Manufacturing capability, technology and access to suppliers have dramatically reduced the gap between established brands and lower-cost competitors.

I’m a cyclist and see it firsthand. Chinese brands I probably wouldn’t have considered a decade ago are now producing bikes, components and apparel that are remarkably good for the money. I may still want the Rapha jersey or new Specialized whip, but increasingly I don’t need it.

Automotive is likely up next. Chinese EV manufacturers like BYD and Xiaomi are combining increasingly strong products and sophisticated technology with significantly lower prices.

As functional differences narrow, more of the reason to choose a brand comes from the experience around the product.

Service: where the organization becomes visible

This is where I think many companies are failing…badly.

Customers don’t care that sales, billing, installation and customer care operate in different systems or report to different executives. They bought from one company and expect to deal with one company.

I think about customer experience a bit like theatre. Backstage can be chaos. Sets are moving, people are changing costumes and someone is solving a crisis. The audience shouldn’t see it. Front of house still needs to be seamless.

Increasingly, customers aren’t just seeing the complexity, they’re being asked to navigate it.

I recently moved and signed up with Rogers for TV, internet, streaming and two phones. I had the entire agreement documented. When it came time to activate, literally nothing was right. Plans were wrong, services were missing and their systems couldn’t honour the package I had agreed to.

I’ve been dealing with a different version of the same problem with Tesla for seven months. Autopay keeps failing. Tesla confirms the account is current and reinstates it. Days later, their system disables it again because of an outstanding balance that doesn’t exist.

Most of the people I’ve dealt with at both companies have been perfectly nice and genuinely tried to help (in that moment). The structures around them couldn’t see the problem through.

Between the two experiences, I’ve spent days of my time trying to solve problems I didn’t create. Neither is fully resolved.

That’s when the org structure becomes the customer’s problem and the customer shouldn’t have to become the integration layer.

So what happened to CX?

Companies became very good at journey mapping, voice of customer, NPS, service design and identifying pain points.

The harder part has always been changing the organization creating them.

A journey map can show exactly where an experience breaks. It can’t connect incompatible systems, change conflicting KPIs, clarify decision rights or force five functions to work together differently.

The CX team may understand the whole journey while the organization remains structured around pieces of it.

That’s the crux of the problem.

Customer journeys need to connect directly to the people, processes, technology, data and governance required to deliver them and there needs to be empowerment to act. Otherwise, we get very good at measuring customer problems without actually fixing them.

AI is going to raise the stakes

We’re about to be flooded with even more slop…err, I mean…content, personalization, automated communications and AI-enabled customer service.

Much of it will be reasonably good and increasingly difficult to differentiate.

That makes the real moments of truth across the customer journey even more important.

AI can make service faster and more efficient, but it can also add another layer between the customer and someone capable of solving the problem. Qualtrics research found customer service had the highest failure rate among the AI applications it studied, with AI performing particularly poorly at making customers feel understood.

The underlying process still matters.

Automating a disconnected journey can simply allow customers to move through a bad experience more efficiently.

But there’s another side to this that companies need to be ready for: customers are getting AI too. They’re already using agents to sit on hold, negotiate bills, resolve complaints, cancel subscriptions and find better deals. Accenture found that 74% of consumers would delegate routine tasks like deal negotiation or complaint resolution to an AI agent.

74%

of consumers would delegate routine tasks like deal negotiation or complaint resolution to an AI agent

Think about what happens when customers no longer have to tolerate the friction, fine print or sheer exhaustion some business models rely on. An AI agent doesn’t get tired after the third transfer, forget to check whether a promotional rate expired, or give up because cancelling is deliberately difficult.

Companies have spent years figuring out how to use technology to optimize the customer. Customers are about to have technology working just as hard for them. And that makes giving them a genuine reason to choose you even more important.

Signature: give people a reason to care

The final piece is what we call a brand’s DNA signature: the distinctive behaviours, details and experiences that make a company feel like itself…and ideally, human.

It doesn’t need to be a grand purpose statement, I’d prefer it wasn’t. Be real, be authentic, embrace community, but most importantly show up when it matters most. The walk must match the talk and too often marketing sells empty promises. No company will be perfect every time, but it’s genuine effort and consistent pursuit that will get noticed.

I worry we’re losing this.

Years of performance optimization have pushed brands toward what can be targeted, measured and converted. AI will make competent content, imagery and personalization available to everyone.

If the product is comparable, communications look increasingly similar and service is mediocre, customers have very little reason left to choose beyond price.

And that makes the lower-cost competitor increasingly difficult to beat.

Customer experience is created by the organization

CX becomes even more valuable as products become easier to replicate and AI fills the world with more competent but similar communications.

But improving it requires understanding how the organization actually delivers the experience, and where its own complexity gets in the way.

A few questions I think are worth asking:

1. Where are customers experiencing our internal complexity?
2. Which moments across the journey have the greatest impact on trust, retention and value?
3. Who can actually fix those moments when the solution crosses multiple functions, and who is accountable?
4. Are we using AI to remove friction, or adding another layer customers need to navigate?
5. Beyond the product itself, what do customers consistently experience that is distinctly us?

We spent a decade getting better at understanding the customer. There is still a lot of work to do connecting that understanding back into how organizations actually operate.

And I think that raises an even bigger question for commercial leaders:

If Product, Service and Signature collectively shape the brand experience, who is accountable for connecting them?

More on that one next.