According to Ekaterina Mamonova, global lead for marketing and CX at Allianz Commercial, in 2025 human behavior and cutting-edge technology are set to come together in ways that can refine what CX is and set new standards for how customers interact with organizations and brands in future.
In this interview with CX Network, she explains the capabilities behind four key technologies, sets out how practitioners can narrow the focus on their competing priorities and secure buy-in from the wider organization.
CX Network: Technological capabilities in CX are developing at pace, with artificial intelligence (AI) now infused in almost every experience and back-end process. Looking to 2025, what do you see as the most significant AI advances that CX practitioners should know about?
Ekaterina Mamonova: In 2025, CX is set to be transformed by some of the truly impactful trends, which will redefine how businesses interact with customers. Some of the most powerful ones that I’ve come across recently combine various dimensions of psychology and human behavior, underpinned by cutting-edge technology solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
For example, quantum computing is set to revolutionize CX analytics by processing and analyzing significant amounts of data in a more efficient way than traditional computers, allowing for real-time insights and predictions that significantly enhance the experience – businesses can also get a significant competitive advantage, supported by faster decision-making and more accurate predictions.
Neuro-responsive interfaces are another innovative solution I find fascinating – these are the systems that adapt in real time based on customers’ neurological responses. This solution is built on the intersection of neuroscience and AI and is aimed at creating interfaces that respond to emotional state and brain activity.
As a CX practitioner, I pay a lot of attention to the latest developments in the SaaS space, as well as solutions focused on predictive experience management: it’s incredible to see how sophisticated these tools are. Some of the hottest solutions in predictive CXM benefit from advanced predictive analytics designed to optimize customer needs and optimize their journey in real time. Such systems process large amounts of customer data – including browsing history, social media activity, purchase patterns and financial behaviors – to define future preferences and predict behavior, deliver tailored experiences and enhance customer satisfaction.
Cognitive CX platforms are state-of-the-art AI-driven systems built to understand, predict and respond to customer behavior – they use a combination of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), machine learning (ML) and data analytics to assess customer interactions across a variety of channels (emails, social media platforms, phone calls) and develop a deep understanding of an individual’s behaviors, needs and preferences.
As these systems learn from each interaction, it becomes possible to not only predict future behaviors, but also make targeted, personalized recommendations in real time. Such positive shifts also tend to be linked to higher retention and average revenue per customer: this becomes possible as companies get enough data to anticipate customer needs before they arise and proactively offer solutions, goods and services that boost satisfaction and loyalty.
One critical element linked to all of the above is enhanced data privacy and transparency – which I also see as a core 2025 CX trend: with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPS becoming stricter, businesses must prioritize transparency in collecting, storing and utilizing customer data.
CX Network: Drawing on your experience devising and deploying CX strategy, what are your top tips for how practitioners can secure buy-in for a new CX initiative?
Ekaterina Mamonova: If you're serious about transforming your organization, then you need a strong and empowered customer experience program. That requires baking CX into your culture. And who sets your culture? Your leadership. That's why you need leadership buy-in from the very beginning, as having the support from the get-go is so critical in making sure that this is successful.
A number of studies addressing the topic have been conducted over the past few years: Forbes research showed that organizations with a superior customer experience generate nearly six times the revenue of customer experience laggards; just over 65 percent of companies compete on customer experience, and almost three quarters of consumers say customer experience influences brand loyalty.
What’s interesting from the practical standpoint, is that the “heavy lifting” of launching a customer experience program starts long before you actually design and build the program: this involves ensuring everyone within the organization, starting at the top, is invested in the idea of delivering positively differentiated customer experience.
One of the key starting points is getting business stakeholders on the same page by defining what CX means across the entire organization:
- What does CX mean in the context of our business?
- What are the challenges that we are trying to address within the organization?
- What is the level of experience we are aiming to offer to our customers, including end clients and distribution partners?
The next step is often a real challenge as CX is often seen as a function, rather than an enterprise-wide capability, but you need to connect your experience strategy to the company’s wider strategic initiatives. Focus on topics such as core strategic initiatives for the next 12 to 24 months and revenue or customer challenges – it’s important to get your CEO and C-suite to address these questions.
These insights will also help you track your future CX efforts and outcomes, as well as demonstrate that you’re delivering results that tie back to the company’s strategic plans.
A robust set of KPIs is something that your key stakeholders care about: as Peter Drucker once said, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. While there is no single right answer when it comes to which metric your business should focus on, I’d suggest looking at:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) for benchmarking;
- Effectiveness, ease and emotion for overall CX and proposition delivery measurement;
- Operating margins, earned growth ratios and expense rations for measuring the impact of CX efforts on business outcomes.
Once the essentials of an effective CX program are in place, including the CX framework, the team, the tech and the metrics, it’s beneficial to refer to the following five pillars of CX business excellence that help solidify overall business engagement and secure buy-in:
- Governance: Identifying key stakeholders across specific teams to enable effective cross-functional decision-making;
- Executive sponsorship: Removing roadblocks, enabling budgeting and prioritization, championing the effort within the organization;
- Internal communication: Enabling awareness, reinforcing CX program value, aligning the business on a common vision;
- Training: Consistently reinforcing key messaging and program value, focus on the use of technology and reinforcement of desired behaviors;
- Managing resistance: Encouraging desired behaviors and initiative adoption through positive reinforcement techniques and clear, consistent communication.
CX Network: When we researched the Global State of CX in 2024, we found that competing priorities were the biggest challenge facing practitioners in their work. How can CX practitioners and leaders cut out the noise and prioritize to ensure they’re focusing on the right things?
Ekaterina Mamonova: I believe that identifying the right, most impactful CX initiatives can be a relatively easy task, once you have the right tools in place – and assuming that the customer experience team has a measurement program in place that is linked to a robust prioritization model.
I personally find the Forrester model really easy to follow – their advisors suggest that you should focus on those CX projects that will (1) do the greatest good for the greatest number of your customers and (2) do the greatest good for your business – in particular, for its revenue and profitability.
If there are any initiatives addressing both (1) and (2), the benefits from the CX standpoint multiply – assuming that elements of feasibility and risk are being taken into account.
More specifically, to quantify and establish the ability of positively differentiated customer experience to drive revenue increase, I’d recommend the following:
- Measure the quality of experience that each customer is having. This can usually be done via satisfaction surveys – key to success here is to ensure that each survey is linked to a unique customer ID, and you have quite a lot of freedom with metrics and scales.
- Focus on loyalty and likelihood to recommend. Aim to understand how likely your customers are to stick to your product and services, and buy incremental items from your brand.
- Using CRM data, link the financial data on an individual account level to customer loyalty indicators. If you’re using a 1-5 scale in your loyalty measurement, and a respondent gives you a score of three, our assumption is that this customer has a 50 percent chance of staying with your brand. If you know that this customer spends $X a year, you could mark their estimated future retention revenue value of 50 percent*$X = $X/2.
- Using regression analysis, it’s possible to build an equation that gives an estimate of the average revenue per account for every individual CX score.
- It’s also quite useful to enhance the model by focusing on future incremental value as well – for this, you subtract the estimated revenue volume at projected CX result (enrichment; additional purchases) from the estimated revenue based on the current (actual) CX measurement results.
Once your CX measurement program is designed to capture this connection, you should be able to confirm that CX improvements have a revenue impact with an attributed financial value, as well as model the expected return on investment (ROI) from allocating funds to CX improvement projects.
Moving on to the practical side of things, 2×2 charts work quite well for such prioritization exercises. Allocate projects and initiatives that will improve the experience for many customers and bring significant economic value for your business, to the upper right corner of this chart, these are the ones that you want to do first. The projects in the lower-left quadrant won’t affect many customers and won’t produce much business value, so you should focus on them last.
Looking at the two remaining quadrants, you’ll see that one will have projects with the biggest positive impact for the business – based on experience they are worth doing next, unless they are so resource-intensive that the business can’t afford them right now.
Prioritization is truly the art and science of making decisions, an active process of choosing one thing over another: what I strongly believe in, is that CX prioritization should not happen to a business, but must rather be an active set of choices the business makes.
Having data to support your storyline helps build a robust business case for why to focus on – or not to focus on – specific CX activities.
Lastly, it’s important to remember that CX prioritization processes can be linear or multi-dimensional, and the key to success is finding enough levers to feel confident about making a prioritization decision. These importance levers can be linked to key drivers of experience, customer cohorts impacted by an issue or change on the customer side of things, and alignment to enterprise strategy, impact on risk, cost or revenue on the business side.47
Quick links
- Building trust through transparency and personalization at Allianz Commercial
- Five things all CX leaders need to prioritize
- CX Talks: Mastering the art of the possible