Customer experience is now a critical issue for marketers – with experience measures at record lows, indicating deep dissatisfaction, brands appear to be struggling under the weight of complex customer journeys, cost-cutting, and margin pressures, but there are ways through the experience labyrinth.
This is covered in full in the Marketer’s Toolkit 2025, complete with case studies and practical takeaways:
Why the collapse of customer service matters
In the US, customer experience quality has hit an all-time low, while 45% of British consumers say service has worsened in the last three years. The business impact? A staggering $3.7 trillion is at risk as customers cut spending or switch brands after poor experiences.
What’s going on?
According to WARC’s 2024 Voice of the Marketer survey, few brand marketers directly manage more than two elements of customer experience – website and/or app design and measuring customer satisfaction.
If measuring customer success is clearly within the remit of marketing, then arguably marketers should have greater influence in more customer-facing aspects of the business to ensure that a consistent brand experience is delivered across the customer journey.
In the survey, we asked what it would take to unlock more investment in service. While there were no standout answers, it was notable that the impact of CX on brand metrics, or brand-driven benefits like reduced churn or pricing power, were not at the top of the list.
Solutions exist
- Promise to the customer: Introduced by LinkedIn and strategy consultant Roger Martin in 2023, it argues that the best way to sell ‘brand’ into the broader organisation is to think of it as a ‘promise to the customer’. Brands that make promises which are valuable, memorable, and – crucially – deliverable have a competitive advantage.
- Good friction: Some CX elements are jettisoned in a charge for efficiency, but this can undo strong brand assets. Understanding what you should keep requires a distinction between “good” and “bad” friction, with the former defined by the IPA as “purposely slowing down the experience to accentuate the brand so it positively impacts the experience without making it harder for the customer”.
Credit: WARC
