Here’s a finding that should make every marketing and CX leader pause: customer experience quality in North America just hit a new all-time low, according to Forrester’s 2025 Global CX Index. For the second consecutive year, a quarter of US brands saw meaningful CX score declines. Globally, brands losing ground outnumber those improving by more than three to one.

This is happening while enterprises are investing more than ever in reaching their customers. More channels, more touchpoints, more data flowing into more platforms. The toolkit has never been broader or more accessible, and yet the outcomes keep sliding in the wrong direction.

The natural question is whether the investments are wrong. I don’t think they are, and I’d bet you don’t either. Most of us aren’t making bad investments. We’re making reasonable ones inside systems that weren’t designed to connect to each other. Competing priorities, inherited tech stacks, teams that were built around channels before anyone used the word “omnichannel.” These aren’t failures of vision. They’re the reality of running marketing inside a large enterprise. But the result is the same: every new initiative, no matter how smart it looks on a roadmap, lands in a gap the customer can feel but the brand can’t see.

Short on time? Here’s the tl;dr.

The Problem

CX scores are at an all-time low despite record marketing investment. Teams are optimizing individual channels well, but nobody owns what the customer actually wants and experiences across all of them.

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What’s Driving It

Consumer expectations are being set by social platforms, not industry peers. Privacy concerns are rising. Digitally native generations now control 32% of US spending and growing. The bar for earning attention is higher than what most marketing orgs were built to clear.

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What’s Emerging

New capabilities like RCS, agentic commerce, and unified messaging APIs are creating real opportunities—but they amplify whatever’s already there. If the strategy is customer-first, they strengthen it. If it isn’t, they make the gaps more visible.

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What the Best Brands Do Differently

They optimize for customer experience, not channel performance. They treat every test as a chance to learn more about their customer. They build intelligence iteratively through structured pilots, not through massive platform investments.

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What You Can Do Now

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of progress: build a solid enough foundation to give you reliable signal and run. Launch small, learn fast, capture insights, and let the results shape what comes next. The technology is ready. The strategic customer-first vision is what creates the edge.

When every team is optimizing, but the customer isn’t feeling it

If you’ve been doing this long enough, the pattern is painfully familiar. We spent the better part of a decade chasing the omnichannel promise: CDPs, marketing clouds, the mythical “single view of the customer.” The tools got more sophisticated and the integrations got more complex, but somehow the customer experience didn’t get proportionally better.

The reason, I think, is that we kept solving for infrastructure when the gap was always about alignment. Email is performing against its own benchmarks. SMS is hitting its delivery targets. Social is tracking engagement. Each team is doing its job well by the metrics it owns. But the customer isn’t experiencing channels. They’re experiencing a brand. And when that brand shows up five times in a week with five uncoordinated messages, the individual channel metrics don’t tell that story.

Forrester’s research puts a number on the disconnect: only 3% of companies qualify as truly customer-obsessed, while 81% believe they are. That’s not because people aren’t trying. It’s because most are optimizing for their slice of the experience, and few (if any) own the whole picture.

McKinsey’s personalization research tells the other side of the same story. Consumers aren’t sitting around waiting for us to figure it out—71% actively expect personalized interactions, and 76% feel frustrated when that expectation goes unmet. The data to deliver on it exists inside most enterprise stacks. But activating it in a way that feels connected to the customer requires something most of us don’t yet have: a shared view of what the customer is experiencing, and an understanding of what they actually want.

This is where applied intelligence becomes practical, not as a technology investment, but as a discipline. Connecting what you know about a customer to what you do next, across teams and touchpoints, is the difference between data that sits in a platform and data that shapes the experience. It doesn’t require restructuring the org chart (and thank goodness for that). It requires agreeing that the customer’s experience is the lens that guides investment decisions holistically across groups, rather than each group making reasonable decisions that happen to add up to something nobody planned.

The bar is being reset, and not by your competitors

Here’s what makes this harder and more urgent: the standard for what “good” looks like isn’t being set by other brands in your industry. It’s being set by the platforms where consumers already interact with brands on their own terms.

Social media has fundamentally changed what consumers consider normal. When you can DM a brand and get a response, comment on a post and shape the conversation, or discover a product through a creator whose taste you trust, that 1:1 accessibility becomes the baseline. Consumers aren’t comparing your email program to your competitor’s. They’re comparing every brand interaction to the best interaction they’ve had anywhere.

Forrester’s 2026 predictions reflect a related shift: the firm forecasts a third of consumers will actively choose offline brand experiences over digital, and more than half of US adults already seek out in-person interactions for richer engagement. That’s not consumers rejecting digital so much as demanding experiences that feel intentional rather than automated.

For brands with a physical presence in hospitality, retail, or healthcare, that’s an invitation to capitalize on what digital-only brands can’t offer: real moments, in real spaces, that build genuine connection. And for those of us who’ve been championing experiential activation internally, here’s the data you need to secure approval. For today’s connected consumer, it might be more strategically important than another campaign flight.

Deloitte’s 2025 Connected Consumer Survey adds another dimension. Consumer privacy concerns surged to 70%, up from 60% the prior year, and fewer than half now believe the benefits of online services outweigh the privacy tradeoffs. In regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, where trust is already hard-won, this trend carries even more weight. Consumers aren’t just raising the bar for experience quality. They’re actively narrowing the number of brands they’ll let in at all.

And this is only going to accelerate as digitally native generations gain purchasing power. Millennials and adult Gen Z now command 32% of US consumer spending, up 8 points from 2020. These consumers grew up on platforms that put them in the driver’s seat, and their expectations for how brands earn and keep their attention are fundamentally different from what most enterprise marketing organizations were built to deliver. The question isn’t whether the bar is rising, it’s whether your brand is ready for the audience that’s about to hold the household digital wallet.

New capabilities reward clarity

The good news is that the capabilities to meet those expectations are maturing fast.

RCS business messaging is a good example. With Apple’s iOS 18 removing the interoperability barrier, Juniper Research projected RCS traffic would reach 50 billion messages globally in 2025, scaling to 200 billion by 2029. Richer media, verified branding, and interactive features genuinely improve the customer experience when deployed with intention. For organizations with a clear view of what their customers need, RCS opens up engagement possibilities that SMS simply can’t support.

Further out, AI-powered shopping agents are creating entirely new touchpoints that go beyond channels into autonomous decision-making on the customer’s behalf. McKinsey projects these agents could mediate $3–5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. This isn’t another channel to manage, it’s a new kind of consumer relationship to design for.

These capabilities are worth getting excited about, though they deliver the most value for organizations with the strategic clarity to plug them into a unified customer experience. New tools amplify whatever is already there. If the approach is customer-first, they strengthen it. If it isn’t, they can make the gaps more visible.

What earning attention actually looks like

BCG’s 2024 loyalty research, covering 10,000+ consumers across nine countries, puts a fine point on this. US consumers now belong to an average of 15+ loyalty programs (up 10% since 2022), but engagement has fallen 10% and loyalty has dropped 20%. More memberships, less connection. Programs that prioritize relationship depth over breadth of reach deliver 4.3 times higher engagement in retail and 3.1 times in hotels.

The same principle applies across marketing. The brands earning customer attention aren’t the ones present on every platform with the highest message volume. They’re the ones where customers feel like the brand actually knows them, where the outreach feels less like outreach and more like the brand showed up at the right moment with something useful.

The brands getting this right aren’t optimizing for channel performance. They’re optimizing for customer experience. There’s a meaningful difference, and customers can feel it.

That doesn’t mean you need everything figured out before you make a move. It means the decisions about where to invest and what to test should be guided by a shared understanding of what your customer actually experiences today and what your customers want that experience to become.

Stop making it precious. Start making it useful.

In an era of data, tools, and high customer expectations, it’s easy to let perfect be the enemy of progress. But you don’t need perfection to learn something valuable—you just need a foundation solid enough to glean reliable insights.

And here’s where I’d encourage every marketing leader to take the pressure off. Stop treating each new test like a make-or-break decision. Give yourself (and your team!) the grace to use any existing excitement and internal support for a new channel, a new message format, or a new technology pilot, and approach it as a learning opportunity. There are no failures when you gain valuable signal. Every test is a chance to discover more about what your customer needs and how (and where) they want to engage. Set up your tests to capture the insights you need, then let them run and embrace the spirit of iteration.

Not everything has to be a transformation. Some of the best strategic progress I’ve seen happens when teams are just paying close attention to what a well-structured pilot teaches them.

And here’s what most teams don’t realize: those pilots aren’t just testing a channel or a message. They’re building the intelligence layer itself. Every test set up to capture real customer insight makes the next decision smarter, the next experience more aligned, and the next capability easier to plug in. Applied intelligence isn’t something you buy and install. It’s a capability you build, one well-designed experiment at a time.

The organizations getting this right aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated martech stacks. They’re the ones that have stopped treating channel strategy, message strategy, and experience strategy as separate conversations. They launch, learn quickly, keep the customer at the center, and build a constantly evolving picture of their audience through the lens of what those audiences actually want.

The long-term destination is intelligence that closes the gap between what you know about your customer and what you do about it—systems where the right message reaches the right person through the right channel without anyone having to orchestrate it manually. That takes clean enough data, aligned enough teams, and a strategy coherent enough for technology to amplify. It might sound like a pipe dream today, but that reality is closer than you think. Even in heavily regulated industries, there’s room to test, learn, and build toward Applied Intelligence deliberately.

Learn forward. Build backward. The organizations building strategic clarity now are the ones that will own what comes next.

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Active Digital partners with the most ambitious brands to close the gap between expanding capabilities and the customer experience clarity required to use them well. When the strategy is right, intelligence amplifies it. When it’s not, more capability just amplifies the noise.

Shawna Strickland is Director of Marketing at Active Digital, where she leads brand strategy, demand generation, and go-to-market for both Active and its enterprise clients across industries.

Hero image by Jim Luo via Unsplash