The boostCX Blog
Knowledge and resources to help you build and scale your business.

New Customer Experience Management Trends for 2026
Looking forward and finding ways to adapt to new technology and new best practices is a key aspect of any business and it is important to understand the growing customer experience management trends to be able to provide a memorable experience. boostCX is looking forward to help you get ahead of the curve with this list of New Customer Experience Management Trends for 2026. Learn more about how hyper-personalization, Artificial Intelligence (AI), proactive customer experience strategies, and more will shape the future of the CXM.
5 Emerging Trends for Customer Experience Management in 2026
The customer experience (CX) has never been more important.
An estimated 90% of businesses make it their primary focus and 73% of customers say that the customer experience is the number one thing they consider when deciding whether to make a purchase. The global customer experience management market is projected to grow from $22.35 billion in 2025 to $68.24 billion by 2032 and it's clear that investing in a positive customer experience is a valid strategy to drive revenue.
Here are five key trends that will define a winning CX strategy in 2026 and beyond:
Hyper-Personalization of Customer Experiences
Hyper-personalization is about taking customer experience personalization to the next level by using advanced technology, like AI and machine learning, to create highly individualized experiences. This goes beyond traditional personalization, which might use a customer's name or purchase history, and uses a broader range of data points, such as browsing behaviors, location, and even contextual factors to tailor interactions in real-time. This can involve anything from dynamically customizing a landing page with relevant content to a chatbot that proactively suggests a new interest-earning account to a bank customer.
Continued Development of AI Technology
The use of Artificial Intelligence in customer experience is growing rapidly, with an estimated 22% growth in the conversational AI market between 2020 and 2025. AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants have the ability to provide 24/7 support and handle simple customer interactions, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex issues. AI also opens the door to sentiment analysis, which helps businesses understand the emotions behind the customer feedback from various platforms.
Increased Use of Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics is the use of data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning to forecast future customer behaviors and needs. It allows businesses to move beyond reactive service and anticipate potential problems before they become more severe. By analyzing a customer's history and real-time patterns, a company can proactively send an alert or offer a solution, which helps prevent customer churn and improves customer retention.
Increased Focus on Emotional Intelligence
In a more automated world, Emotional Intelligence (EI) in human agents is more important than ever. Emotionally intelligent agents are able to empathize with customers, de-escalate tense situations, and build stronger relationships, which helps build brand loyalty. By developing skills like self-awareness, self-regulation, and active listening, support teams can turn negative interactions into positive ones and make customers feel valued.
Continued Optimization of CXM Strategies
Always optimizing CXM strategies will be a key focus for companies in 2026. This involves using innovative tools and technologies to gather customer data, identify customer pain points, and create customer journey maps. By regularly monitoring KPIs like customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS), businesses can measure the impact of CXM strategies and make sure they are meeting expectations.
READ MORE: How To Find the Right Customer Experience Management Software
As customer expectations continue to grow and change, it is even more important to stay ahead of these New Customer Experience Management Trends for 2026. By embracing hyper-personalization, AI-powered solutions, predictive analytics, emotional intelligence, and continuous strategy optimization, you can set your business apart from your competitors.
Contact boostCX today to see how our customer experience management platform can help you implement these trends and strategies!

How To Value Customer Emotions in the Customer Experience
How a customer feels about their customer experience with your company is reflected in how much time and money they are willing to spend with your company. The customer experience and the emotions that go hand in hand with a good or bad customer experience can translate to tangible success for your company if you learn how to value customer emotions in the customer experience and employ customer-focused strategies.
4 Reasons Why Customer Emotions Are Important to the Customer Experience
Building an emotional connection with your customers can be the single most significant differentiator for a brand, yet it remains an untapped opportunity for many companies. When you prioritize how a customer feels rather than just what they do or what they purchase, you unlock hidden value that competitors focused solely on operational metrics cannot reach. This emotional resonance acts as a lifeline when mistakes are made, is a driver for customer brand advocates, and is a direct line to increased long-term revenue that will set your business apart in a crowded economic landscape.
1. Emotion Translates to Customer Loyalty
When customers feel connected to a brand emotionally, their loyalty skyrockets beyond what operational satisfaction can achieve on its own. Research has shown that customers giving high emotion ratings are almost 6x more likely to trust a brand and 5x more likely to purchase more than those with lower emotion ratings. Maybe the most telling statistic is that high emotion ratings generate a much higher Net Promoter Score (NPS) compared to businesses with low ratings.
2. Ignoring Customer Emotions is Value Lost
Despite the clear financial benefits of an emotional connection with customers, many businesses are leaving money on the table by treating emotion as a soft metric. Data shows that while general success and effort scores sit at 66% and 65% respectively, customer emotion scores lag behind at an estimated 55%, which represents a significant emotion gap. By failing to close this gap or ignoring it completely, companies are underdelivering on an element of the customer experience that is a strong predictor of loyalty and retention.
3. Companies That Value Customer Emotions Outperform Competitors
Investing in the emotional side of the customer experience is more than just a feel-good strategy. It is a successful strategy that breeds financial success. Long-term studies indicate that companies that excel in the emotion component of customer experience outperform competitors by an estimated 36% in stock returns. In addition, emotion leaders in select industries finish higher than industry averages, while companies that lag behind or who ignored this critical factor fell behind in key financial metrics, proving that emotional connection correlates directly with financial success.
4. Negative Customer Emotions Are More Persistent
While positive customer emotions can be difficult to maintain over time, negative emotional experiences stick with consumers longer and have trended upward in recent years. Analysis shows that positive emotions like happiness, excitement, and relief have dropped by significant margins in the past 5 - 10 years, while negative emotions like anger, worry, and confusion have increased. Because negative feelings are more persistent and stick with customers longer and continue to rise, brands must be hyper-vigilant in detecting and resolving friction to prevent long-term damage to brand reputation.
READ MORE: How To Create a Customer Engagement Strategy
Understanding how to value customer emotions in the customer experience is a key to unlocking sustainable growth, differentiating your brand from competitors, and achieving your financial goals. By using the right tools to listen, interpret, and act on customer sentiment, you can ensure your strategy aligns with the emotional needs of your customers.
Contact boostCX today for a demo of our customer experience management platform and start building connections that last with your customers!

How To Improve the Customer Journey in the Utility Industry
Consumers in many industries have become accustomed to the seamless, personalized experiences offered by retail and tech companies, utility and telecom providers can no longer afford to sit back and expect customers to stick with their companies. Learning how to improve the customer journey in the utility industry is key to building trust, reducing cost-to-serve metrics, and improving a brand reputation. By shifting the focus from ratepayer metrics to a more comprehensive view of the customer journey, utility and telecommunications companies can transform necessary services into valued relationships.
6 Steps to Improve the Utility and Telecom Customer Journey
Reliability remains the core product for utilities companies — but the customer experience is now the key differentiator. Research has found that utility customers who use digital channels are more satisfied, but the utilities industry lags behind in customer satisfaction scores compared to the retail or banking industries.
To close this gap and meet rising expectations, businesses must adopt a more proactive approach to the customer experience. By implementing these strategic steps to improve the customer journey, utility and telecom companies can reduce customer churn rates and increase engagement.
1. Gain an In-Depth Understanding of the Customer Journey
To create change that makes a difference for your company, you need to move beyond assumptions about the customer journey by actively collecting customer feedback across all touchpoints to accurately identify customer pain points and the parts of the journey that create a positive experience.
2. Map Your Customer Journey
It is critical to visualize the customer lifecycle and map the customer journey for your company. Create detailed maps that outline every interaction and customer touchpoint with your company, from the initial service setup and first bill to outage reporting and service transfers.
3. Align Your Customer Experience Strategy
Silos and divisions within your company can create friction, which makes it even more important to align your customer experience strategy across the entire organization. This ensures that field technicians, call center agents, and digital teams share the same vision and goals.
4. Invest in Technology to Improve the Customer Journey
Utility companies can modernize their approach by investing in comprehensive customer experience management platforms like boostCX, which allow companies to collect customer data, automate surveys, and analyze customer sentiment in real time with customer engagement tools. By implementing this technology to unify data from social media, call centers, and direct feedback, utilities companies can move from reactive problem-solving to predictive service models that anticipate customer needs.
5. Prioritize Transparent Customer Communication
Trust can be hard to earn in this industry, so it is important to prioritize transparent customer communication by proactively notifying users about service interruptions, estimated restoration times, and billing changes before they have to ask. Utilizing an omnichannel customer experience strategy by sending critical updates via SMS text, email, and push notifications helps ensure that customers feel informed and valued, reducing call center volume during high-stress events.
6. Streamline Complicated Processes
Reduce customer effort by simplifying high-friction touchpoints or pain points. Key examples may include implementing one-click renewal options for utility services, providing self-service portals for billing issues, or offering a mobile app for reporting outages without waiting on hold. By removing the red tape from routine tasks like transferring service addresses or upgrading plans, you show respect for your customer's time and lower the barrier to satisfaction.
READ MORE: Most Important Customer Experience KPIs in the Utility Industry
In the end, the effort to improve the customer journey in the utility industry is an investment in the long-term growth and success of your organization. By listening to your customers and implementing the right technology, you can turn improved customer satisfaction into operational efficiency.
Contact boostCX today for a demo and see how our platform can help you power a better journey!

How To Create a Customer Engagement Strategy
In a crowded market, it is even more important that you connect with your customers and build brand loyalty - and that starts with a positive customer experience and quality customer engagement. While customer experience management strategies are important to the success of many businesses, customer engagement is a key element that you can’t allow to fall by the wayside. A well-prepared and well thought out customer engagement strategy may be the step you need to take to build your brand identity and attract loyal customers. Learn how to create a customer engagement strategy with this quick step-by-step guide created by boostCX.
5 Steps to Create a Customer Engagement Strategy
Simply acquiring customers isn't enough. You need to be able to retain them by building meaningful, long-term relationships with your brand. This is the core tenet of customer engagement - it transforms one-time buyers into loyal brand advocates, which directly impacts your profitability. Creating a customer engagement plan is essential, and these five steps to create a customer engagement strategy will provide the foundation you need to build that connection and drive growth.
1. Define Your Strategy Goals
Before you can engage with your customers, you must define what success looks like and what you want the results of your strategy to be. Is your primary goal to increase customer retention, boost lifetime value, or improve brand advocacy? Establishing clear, measurable objectives at the start will guide other decisions in your strategy and ensure your efforts are focused on the desired outcome.
2. Know Your Customers
Effective engagement is impossible if you don't really understand your customer base. This step involves developing detailed customer personas, mapping the customer journey, and identifying customer pain points and preferences. By knowing who your customers are and what they value, you can create engagements that feel relevant and personal, not generic.
3. Personalize Engagement on Multiple Channels
Customers have come to expect a seamless, personalized experience wherever they interact with a brand. Use the data and insights from the previous step to deliver tailored messages, offers, and support across preferred channels - whether that's email, social media, SMS, or your mobile app. This omnichannel personalization shows you know them as individuals and appreciate their business.
4. Measure Your Success
A strategy is useless without the ability to track your success, and you must track your performance against the goals you set in step one. It is important to monitor valuable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can include Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), customer retention rate, and churn rate. This data provides concrete proof of what's working and where you need to improve.
5. Optimize and Refine Your Strategy
Customer engagement is not a one-time project. It is an ongoing process of adaptation, refinement, and optimization. Use the data and KPIs you're tracking to continuously test, optimize, and refine your customer engagement strategy. As customer expectations evolve, your strategy must evolve with them to remain effective.
READ MORE: Customer Experience Management Trends for 2026
By following this framework, you can move from reactive interactions with your customers to creating a successful customer engagement strategy that builds genuine brand loyalty. This approach is the key to making your brand and securing long-term success.
Contact boostCX today for a demo to see how our customer experience management platform can help you measure, manage, and optimize every customer engagement!

How To Improve Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is more than just a buzzword.
It is the emotional connection and continued relationship a customer has with your brand. It’s the sum of all interactions - from their first website visit to a post-purchase support call. In an economy where loyalty drives long-term success, learning how to improve customer engagement may be the most critical investment a business can make for long-term and sustainable growth.
10 Ways to Improve Customer Engagement
A strong customer engagement strategy is the foundation of a successful company. Businesses that focus on engagement are more profitable, as an engaged customer represents an average 23% premium in terms of share of revenue compared to the average customer. In addition, companies that actively work to improve customer engagement can increase cross-sell revenue by 22% and drive a higher annual increase in customer retention.
Here are 10 ways you can improve customer engagement and build customer relationships that drive this level of success:
1. Personalize Customer Engagements
You need to move beyond generic messaging and use customer data to personalize your communications, recommendations, and offers to customers based on their specific needs and past behaviors.
2. Better Understand Your Customers
Knowledge is half the battle. Develop detailed customer personas and map the customer journey to gain better insight into customer motivations, pain points, and expectations at every touchpoint.
3. Create a Brand Narrative
Your customer engagement must go beyond just selling a product or providing a service. You need to build an authentic brand story and mission that customers can connect with on an emotional level.
4. Simplify Communication with Self-Service Options
Self-service tools like FAQs and chatbots are vital, as their true value lies in enhancing communication by giving customers 24/7 access to answers. This clear and immediate communication builds trust and reduces friction.
5. Create Customer Loyalty Programs
It is important for successful companies to reward repeat business with exclusive perks, discounts, or early access to new products. This makes customers feel valued and gives them a great reason to remain loyal to your company.
6. Establish Clear Goals for Customer Engagement
What does a successful customer engagement strategy look like? Define what success looks like by setting measurable KPIs - such as retention rates, repeat purchase frequency, or Net Promoter Score (NPS) - to track your progress.
7. Employ a Social Media Marketing Campaign
A majority of your customers likely use social media. Use social platforms not just to promote your products and services, but to interact and engage with customers by running engaging contests, asking questions, and actively responding to comments and messages.
8. Engage with Customers Where They Are Most Active
Don't force customers to come to you. It is important that your business be present and accessible on the channels that your customers already use - whether that's email, SMS, social media, or a mobile application.
9. Encourage Customer Feedback
Customer feedback can help you better understand the customer experience and make key adjustments. Actively ask for your customers' opinions through surveys, polls, and review prompts at key touchpoints, showing them that you value their voice.
10. Collect and Analyze Customer Feedback Data
Customer feedback is only a part of the equation. You need to be able to use the data provided by customer feedback. Use a customer experience management platform to gather all your feedback in one place, allowing you to analyze trends, identify recurring issues, and make data-driven decisions.
READ MORE: What Is the Value of a Human-Focused Customer Experience?
The process of improving customer engagement is always about listening, learning, and adapting to your customers' needs. By implementing these key strategies, you can transform passive buyers into active, loyal brand advocates.
Ready to build deeper, more profitable customer relationships? Contact boostCX for a demo to see how our platform can help you listen, analyze, and engage like never before!
Understand Your CX Maturity Level
How mature is your customer experience strategy? Find out with a FREE, personalized CX Health Check.
The boostCX Health Check can help you understand where you're at, and where you need to be. Complete the assessment to:
Evaluate your current customer experience operations
Get personalized, tactical advice on areas of improvement
Receive a CX Maturity Model score
Scale your CX operations for success
