The customer experience is undergoing a dizzying evolution that’s disrupting the status quo like never before. Brands must evolve their CX strategies along with these changes—to both avoid massive pitfalls and seize new opportunities.
In the 54-minute on-demand webinar below, we discuss 10 major changes affecting the customer experience and how brands can adapt. And in the remainder of this post, we share a quick primer on each of those 10 changes.
How Are You Adapting to These 10 Big CX Changes?
These are changes we’re seeing in the industry and among our Oracle Digital Experience Agency clients.
1. Organic search is declining.
Not only are generative AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity gaining search market share, but long-time search leader Google is using genAI to provide AI Overviews. In many instances, these satisfactorily answer the user’s question, making it unnecessary for them to click through to any of the search result web pages.
For brands that have invested heavily in content marketing, this poses a serious risk. Slightly more than half of all Google searches are for information content, according to SparkToro research. All of that referral traffic should be considered at high risk of disappearing in the years ahead.
2. Closed platforms are obscuring attribution.
Closed platforms like Facebook and Discord are increasingly obscuring some or all of the traffic they refer out, according to SparkToro. And cookie consent is further complicating attribution, suppressing conversion tracking by up to 20%, according to Orbit Media.
This means it’s getting harder for brands to get accurate information from tools like Google Analytics and to understand which channels and which activities are driving engagement and conversions.
3. Open platforms are disrupting the status quo, too.
The biggest change has been Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, which has radically devalued email opens over the past few years. However, more recently, Google and Yahoo’s policies of using AI to automatically apply schema to promotional emails has broken email attribution.
In some cases, the applied schema uses advertising and affiliate links. So not only are brands losing the attribution tied to their promotional email campaigns, but they’re paying for click throughs related to these campaigns.
Related post: Email Annotations & Schema: ‘Automatic Extraction’ & Controlling Your Preview Content
4. Budgets are shifting from marketing to advertising.
Strangely, brands are reallocating their budgets away from high-ROI marketing activities to lower-ROI advertising initiatives, according to a Gartner survey.
“In these tough times, CMOs are prioritizing investments that have demonstrable impact,” said Ewan McIntyre, VP Analyst and the Chief of Research for the Gartner Marketing Practice. “However, there’s a mismatch between the channels CMOs are investing in and their perceived impact.”
This will have implications not only on short-term brand profitability, but also long-term brand loyalty.
5. Mobile messaging growth is accelerating.
While email marketing is still the king of digital promotions, SMS and push marketing volumes have been rising. For example, here at Oracle, we saw substantial increases in SMS and push volumes orchestrated through Oracle CX during the holidays. This growth increases the need to use each channel optimally and to orchestrate all of these messages to create cohesive customer journeys and experiences.
6. Loyalty programs are being reprioritized.
Pandemic supply chain problems upended brand loyalty. Then high inflation spurred further brand shifting. Loyalty programs are widely viewed as the solution—but they also solve other problems, too.
Related webinar: 6 Loyalty Program Trends to Watch
7. Creative teams are going cross-channel.
Creative teams that are dedicated completely to a single channel like email or advertising are going away. Brands see lots of benefits from having cross-functional teams, often aided by generative AI.
8. GenAI time-savings should be reinvested.
According to a variety of sources, generative AI is estimated to replace tasks that currently represent about one-third of the average worker’s time. Given the current state of CX, the worst thing brands could do is bank those time-savings.
9. Data quality is impeding ML adoption.
“Fifty-three percent of global B2C marketing decision-makers acknowledge that it’s difficult to update their data strategy to adapt to data deprecation,” according to Forrester’s 2024 B2C Marketing Priorities And Challenges report. “Similarly, 47% struggle to introduce or enhance their AI capabilities.”
We see these same data quality and data mobilization issues with our clients when they’re deploying AI. While everyone’s excited about AI, improving data quality and infrastructure is a prerequisite.
Related webinar: How to Overcome Common AI Mistakes
10. Empathy is king in a new age of anxiety.
US consumers have never been more politically polarized. And this polarization directly impacts consumer sentiment, according to research by Morning Consult. With Donald Trump winning a second presidency, that means we’re seeing consumer sentiment among Democrats plunge.
So, if your brand operates in heavily democratic markets or attracts many liberal customers, you are likely to see significant changes in customer behaviors, especially during the first 18 months of Trump’s presidency when he’s likely to have the most power to enact his agenda. There are lessons we can learn from past times of high anxiety when more brand empathy strengthened customer relationships.
2025 will bring many big changes. Make sure your organization is paying attention to these shifts and has a plan for how to adapt.
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Need help with your customer experience and digital marketing campaigns? Oracle Digital Experience Agency has hundreds of marketing and communication experts ready to help Responsys, Eloqua, Unity, and other Oracle customers create stronger connections with their customers and employees—even if they’re not using an Oracle platform as the foundation of that experience. With a 94% satisfaction rate, our clients are thrilled with the award-winning work our creative, strategy, and other specialists do for them, giving us an outstanding NPS of 82.
For help overcoming your challenges or seizing your opportunities, talk to your Oracle account manager, visit us online, or email us at OracleAgency_US@Oracle.com.
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