Customer Experience Trends That Last: What Leaders Should Fund Now

ICX Consulting, a customer experience and commercial strategy firm, reviewed the customer experience trends forecast for 2023 to see which ones turned into lasting advantages. Personalization, omnichannel service and the integration of e-commerce with CRM proved durable, AI moved from chatbots to agents, and the winners were companies that treated CX as a revenue system.

In the digital age, customer experience matters more every year. Consumers have more choices and can easily share their experiences online. Companies need to proactively gather customer feedback and use it to improve their products and services.

The concept and application of Customer Experience had been growing for years, and the outlook for customer experience in 2023 was clear. Experiences would continue to be technologically advanced and increasingly personalized. Creating customized experiences was one of the top CX trends of that year, including tailored product suggestions, targeted marketing campaigns and personalized customer service interactions.

Looking back is useful for executives because trend lists are cheap and investment decisions are not. Separating the trends that changed revenue, retention and cost to serve from the ones that stayed in conference slides helps leadership decide where the next budget should go, and which promises to treat with caution.

Consider a budget meeting at a retail and services group in the first quarter of a new year. The chief marketing officer asks to fund a voice shopping pilot, the head of digital wants an augmented reality fitting tool, and the service director asks for money to merge three customer databases. All three proposals come with an attractive slide about the trend behind them. The chief executive asks a different question. Which of the initiatives approved two years ago actually moved revenue, retention or cost to serve? The room goes quiet, because nobody has a table that connects the spending to the result. A retrospective on the 2023 trends is useful precisely because it lets leadership ask that question with evidence and not with enthusiasm.

What were the customer experience trends for 2023?

The 2023 outlook grouped the main customer experience trends into two families. The first was service and channels. The second was technology, mainly e-commerce and CRM. The table summarizes how each one has evolved since.

Omnichannel customer service, from more channels to one conversation

One trend was the continued shift toward omnichannel customer service. Customers expected to contact companies and receive support through a variety of channels.

The channels in question were email, phone, chat and social networks, and customers expected to move among them as they pleased.

Companies had to invest in technology and training to deliver seamless and consistent experiences across all channels. That conclusion has held, but the bar has moved. Offering many channels is no longer a differentiator. What customers notice is whether the company remembers them when they switch from chat to phone, or from a salesperson to the service team.

For leadership, the practical test is simple. Pick a recent customer issue and trace how many times the customer had to repeat information. Each repetition is a cost to serve and a small withdrawal from loyalty.

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CX technology trends in e-commerce and CRM

E-commerce and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) were expected to be essential in shaping customer experience trends in 2023, and they were.

In e-commerce, companies focused on creating personalized and seamless online shopping experiences. That included customized product recommendations, dynamic pricing and real-time inventory updates. Companies also kept investing in chatbots and virtual assistants to provide fast and efficient customer service.

CRM became more critical as companies looked to build stronger relationships with their customers. Companies used CRM software to collect, analyze and use customer data to improve their marketing and sales efforts and provide personalized customer service.

The most important recommendation of that outlook was to integrate e-commerce and CRM systems to deliver a more seamless customer experience, for example by bringing purchase history and customer preferences into product recommendations and personalized marketing campaigns. This is where personalization stops being a slogan. McKinsey's research found that 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions and that personalization most often drives a 10 to 15 percent revenue lift. That lift depends on data that is connected, current and trusted, which is a process and governance question before it is a software question.

Read also: Omnichannel in your marketing strategy.

Dynamic pricing deserves a separate note for executives. Adjusting prices in real time can protect margin, but it can also damage trust if customers perceive it as arbitrary. It works best when pricing rules are explicit, tied to value and inventory, and governed by a pricing strategy rather than by the e-commerce platform's default settings.

Social commerce and voice commerce, what actually happened

One e-commerce trend was the continued growth of social commerce, meaning the use of social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok to drive sales and connect with customers. Businesses were expected to use these platforms to showcase products, create shoppable posts and even enable purchases directly inside the platform.

The size of the opportunity varies widely by market. McKinsey estimated that social commerce in China had reached 352 billion dollars, about 13 percent of total e-commerce, while US social commerce was projected to reach nearly 80 billion dollars by 2025. For most B2B companies, social platforms remain a discovery and relationship channel rather than a checkout.

Another trend was the rise of voice commerce, where customers make purchases with voice commands through smart speakers and other devices. Companies were advised to optimize their e-commerce platforms and marketing strategies for voice search and ensure their products were easy to find through voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant. Voice search optimization is still sensible hygiene. Before treating voice as a buying channel, however, leaders should check how many of their own customers actually purchase that way, and compare that opportunity with the cost of fixing the journeys customers already use every day.

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From chatbots to AI agents in customer service

The 2023 outlook expected chatbots and virtual assistants to become widespread, and CRM platforms to use AI and machine learning to automate and personalize customer interactions, including product recommendations, targeted campaigns and automated service. Generative AI accelerated that shift far beyond what most forecasts imagined.

A Gartner survey of customer service leaders found that 85 percent would explore or pilot customer-facing conversational generative AI in 2025. Customers are open to it, with conditions. In a 2026 survey of 3,566 customers, Gartner reported that 87 percent consider it essential that companies using generative AI for service offer an option to reach a human agent, while half say generative AI makes their interactions easier.

The lesson for leaders is that AI amplifies whatever process it sits on. An AI agent connected to clean customer records, clear business rules and a defined escalation path reduces cost to serve and response times. The same agent on top of fragmented data automates confusion. Our article on how AI agents are transforming the customer experience explores the operating model behind it.

AR and VR, where immersive experiences add value

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) were expected to become more popular to enhance customer engagement, with immersive and interactive brand experiences accessible through smartphones and other devices. In practice, AR tends to add the most value where customers need to visualize a product before buying, such as furniture, eyewear or cosmetics, and VR is used mostly in training and specialized demonstrations. The executive question is not whether the technology is impressive but whether it removes a real doubt that is currently costing sales or causing returns.

How the lasting trends look in different industries

The trends that lasted do not look the same in every sector. In retail and consumer goods, the integration of e-commerce and CRM supports personalized offers, loyalty programs and better stock decisions, while social commerce and augmented reality help shoppers decide before they buy. In banking and insurance, omnichannel continuity matters most, because customers who start a request in the app and finish it with an advisor expect that nobody will ask them to begin again, and regulated sectors must also be able to show a clean record of every interaction.

In telecommunications and utilities, the volume of routine requests makes AI assistants attractive, provided that a customer with a billing dispute or an outage can reach a person without friction. In healthcare and education, reminders, scheduling and follow-up through the customer's preferred channel improve attendance and satisfaction, and privacy expectations raise the bar for how data is shared. In business to business services, the lasting value is less about checkout and more about a shared view of the account across sales, delivery and support, so that the customer feels one company is serving them.

Limits and trade-offs to keep in mind

Looking back also exposes the costs of following trends too quickly. Personalization built on poor data produces irrelevant or even uncomfortable recommendations, and customers notice when a company knows something about them that it should not. Dynamic pricing can lift margin while eroding trust, and aggressive automation can lower cost per contact while raising the number of contacts needed to solve a problem. Every one of these initiatives needs a metric that captures the customer side as well as the cost side.

There is also the question of capacity. A leadership team that tries to launch six trends at once usually completes none of them well, and the teams that run daily operations absorb the strain. It is wiser to pick the two or three initiatives with the clearest link to revenue or retention, fund the data and process work they depend on, and run small pilots before scaling. Return to the budget meeting. The chief executive approved only the database consolidation and a limited AI assistant for the two most frequent service requests, and asked the other two sponsors to return with evidence from their own customers. The following year, the merged records made the voice and augmented reality questions much easier to answer.

Questions to ask before funding the next trend

A short set of questions keeps the conversation honest. Which customers asked for this, and how do we know? Which journey does it improve, and what is the cost of that journey today? What data and process work must happen first, and who owns it? If the initiative works, which number on the executive dashboard will move, and by when will we know? A trend that cannot answer these questions is a candidate for a small pilot and not for a full budget line.

What this means for the C-level

In short, the e-commerce and CRM trends of 2023 focused on personalization and automation through AI, social commerce and voice commerce. Companies that wanted to stay ahead had to optimize their e-commerce platforms and marketing strategies and integrate e-commerce and CRM to deliver a seamless experience. A customer-centric approach, effective communication and the use of digital channels remain the critical elements to improve the customer experience. Translated into priorities for leadership, that means the following.

To convert, use unified customer data to personalize offers and follow-up at the moments where prospects hesitate, not across every message. To retain, measure how often customers must repeat information across channels and set a target to reduce it. For loyalty, base recommendations and cross-selling on real purchase and service history stored in the CRM.

To serve, deploy AI assistants on well-defined, high-volume requests and guarantee a clear path to a human agent. And for efficiency, retire channels and tools that add cost without improving resolution, conversion or satisfaction.

A practical checklist to review your CX roadmap

The review begins by listing the CX initiatives funded in the last two years and the business metric each was supposed to move. Then mark which ones moved that metric, which did not and which were never measured. Next, check whether e-commerce, CRM and service systems share one customer record, and if they do not, make that the first priority. Identify the three customer journeys with the highest volume or the highest cost to serve.

For each journey, decide which steps AI can handle and where a human must stay in control, and define escalation rules, knowledge sources and quality checks before launching any AI assistant. Pause or retire initiatives built on trends that never reached your customers, such as channels with negligible use. Finally, present the result to the executive committee as a short portfolio, with what to scale, what to fix and what to stop, and review it every quarter.

To organize this review, use the free ICX CX Transformation Framework toolkit. It helps your team connect each initiative to processes, technology and the customer outcome it should deliver.

How ICX helps

ICX Consulting helps companies turn CX trends into decisions with measurable returns. Through our customer experience consulting, the ICX Compass methodology and our work on AI agents for sales and customer service, we diagnose where the experience is losing revenue, redesign the priority journeys and implement them in the CRM and e-commerce platforms. To plan the next stage, see how to plan an end-to-end CX transformation program. Wondering which of your CX investments are paying off? Request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant.

Frequently asked questions

Which customer experience trend from 2023 delivered the most value?

For most companies, the integration of e-commerce, CRM and service data delivered the most durable value, because it enables every other trend. Personalization, AI assistants and consistent omnichannel service all depend on a single, reliable view of the customer. Companies that skipped this step often found their new tools working with incomplete or contradictory information.

Should companies still invest in chatbots?

Rule-based chatbots are being replaced by generative AI assistants that understand open questions and can complete tasks. The investment makes sense for high-volume, well-documented requests. It should include an up-to-date knowledge base, clear limits on what the assistant may do and an easy handoff to a person when the case is complex or sensitive.

How should executives evaluate a new CX trend?

Ask three questions before funding it. Which customer journey does it improve, which business metric should move and by how much, and what process or data changes are needed for it to work. If the answers are vague, run a small pilot with a defined segment and a deadline instead of committing to a full rollout.

Is social commerce relevant for B2B companies?

Rarely as a sales channel, but often as a source of influence. B2B buyers research suppliers, read peer opinions and follow experts on social platforms before talking to sales. For B2B firms, the priority is useful content and visible expertise that feed qualified conversations, rather than in-platform checkout features designed for consumer purchases.

Trends come and go, but the companies that grow are the ones that know which experiences their customers value and fund those first. If you want to make that call with evidence, talk to an ICX consultant about your customer experience roadmap.

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