Customer experience is at a crossroads as we step into 2025, a year where businesses face mounting pressure to stand out in a crowded market with fast-growing technology innovations. The rise of AI enables competitors to replicate features, ship faster, and undercut pricing easier than ever before. So, what remains the competitive edge? Your customer experience.
It’s no surprise then that in 2025, 89% of businesses will compete primarily on customer experience, surpassing product and price as the deciding factors for success. Yet, despite its growing importance, CX has been in decline for three consecutive years. This steady decline is now prompting 40% of companies to increase their CX investments above inflation in 2025.
To turn this trend around, businesses need to do more than just react. CS teams need to deeply understand what customers expect and anticipate their needs to deliver proactive, personalized solutions.
Winning Customers by Competing on CX
For companies to win in 2025 and beyond, they’ll need to have the ability to consistently deliver personalized, seamless, and value-driven interactions that make customers feel understood, valued, and supported. It's the differentiator that keeps customers for the long-term, even when competing products may deliver more features.
The onus now is now on business leaders to design, test and deliver solutions that bring customer obsession to life. You must ensure your products and services reflect this focus in meaningful, demonstrative ways throughout the customer experience.
That means for SaaS providers, it's no longer just about having the best technology. It's about understanding your customers better and faster than anyone else.
In a world where product development cycles are incredibly short, your real competitive advantage comes from knowing the needs, pain points, and problems of your customers quickly and precisely.
By prioritizing CX over just product capabilities, companies build trust, deepen relationships, and create memorable experiences that set them apart. In short, the relationships you foster with customers and the experience you build is your "It Factor", the magic that turns satisfied customers into lifelong fans.
Knowing Your Customers
When you know your customers (really know them) you stop chasing problems and start driving outcomes, that’s when customer success becomes a growth engine for the entire business.
Like any relationship, knowing your customers, from the very start vs. spinning endless cycles to fix down the road, is crucial to long-term success. This is especially true in B2B where relationships and tailored solutions, that are aligned to your customers’ KPIs and broader strategic goals, play significant roles in customer satisfaction and retention. Getting this right as early as possible is the strongest strategic lever to lock in renewals and expansion revenue opportunities.
The CX comes down to a few challenges that have emerged with the evolution of SaaS:
- Customers have become used to high-quality experiences over time, raising the bar on what they now consider exceptional. Meeting these heightened expectations is increasingly difficult for companies. This not only creates gaps in service delivery but also increases the risk of customers seeking competitive alternatives in search of a better experience.
- As a direct result of the economic pressure and the resulting mandate for teams to do more with less, CX is closely tied to employee experience. High turnover rates, burnout, and challenges in retaining skilled staff, especially in customer-facing roles, have eroded service quality and consistency.
- While many companies publicly emphasize CX, internal execution often lags. Silos, insufficient data integration, and weak alignment between departments prevent CX strategies from delivering intended results.
But knowing your customers and their evolving needs is only the start. As the saying goes, knowledge without action is meaningless. The real impact on customer experience is demonstrated when businesses consistently apply best practices from start to finish.
Customer Success Starts with Onboarding
Every exceptional customer experience starts with a strong foundation, and that foundation is built during onboarding. Onboarding isn’t just a process, it’s the gateway to building trust, showcasing value, and setting customers up for long-term success.
Good onboarding doesn’t just reduce churn. It’s a multiplier for loyalty and advocacy. Poor onboarding, on the other hand, can undermine even the best product or the most advanced AI.
Investing in the customer experience helps to better understand and meet customer needs more effectively while building a strong foundation for long-term relationships built on proactive pursuit to deliver exceptional white glove experiences, from day one.
