Customer Experience is not just facing a challenge, but an existential crisis, according to Riccardo Pasto, Principal Analyst on the Customer Experience team at Forrester. In a recent interview, Pasto painted a not so rosy picture for the future of CX, predicting a critical divide where only a few elite teams thrive, leaving the majority to struggle with fatigue and budget constraints.
I spoke to Riccardo recently, where we took a deep dive into the future of CX, why metric obsession is a death spiral for many CX teams, and why most CX journey maps are about to be thrown out the window. The future may sound gloomy, but not all hope is lost! Organisations have the opportunity to reset their strategy and build highly successful CX teams in 2026.
Below is a summary of what we spoke about. Please visit our Youtube Channel to listen to the full interview.
Mark Atterby (MA): Riccardo, in your most recent report , “A Few CX Teams Will Rebuild While Most Succumb To Fatigue”, as well as making a number of predictions, you assert that 2026 will be a critical inflection point for the Customer Experience (CX) profession. Why is that?
Riccardo Pasto (RP): Next year, 2026, will be an inflection point. Over the past few years, overall CX quality has either stalled or declined in many industry verticals and regions across the globe. Business leaders are demanding proof of impact. So that’s one thing: declining CX quality. At the same time, of course, there is technology and, more specifically,
With AI adoption, I feel we are still in this honeymoon phase. The reality, though, is that scaling these AI efforts takes really strong foundations: data governance, change management—I would argue we often forget the impact of technology on people. So again, it’s about going beyond the hype and honeymoon phase. When you put these two things together—the declining CX quality and the AI disruption—then you have this strong gravitational pull back to the familiar. What is the familiar? Dashboards, more survey scores, but not necessarily more useful stuff for the organisation.
MA: In the report you highlight the dichotomy where a minority of CX teams will modernise, upskill, and reposition CX as a catalyst for sustainable business value while the majority remains fixated on legacy practices and metric obsession. What is the single most crucial variable determining which side a CX team falls on: executive sponsorship, budget, size, or the specific skill set of the CX leader and team?
RP: If I had to pick one, I would say the most important variable, based on my experience, is the skills and competencies that CX leaders need to cultivate to achieve specific organisational outcomes.
For example, if the business goal is to improve customer retention, there is a specific set of capabilities required for the organisation to be effective. While a foundational Voice of Customer (VoC) program and the ability to capture perception and behavioural data are important, to directly impact retention, the team critically needs strong customer complaints management capabilities, complaint resolution capabilities, and closed-loop feedback mechanisms. This ensures you can identify customers having a bad experience and fix it promptly.
To download the full report: “A Few CX Teams Will Rebuild While Most Succumb To Fatigue”
This is a practical example of capabilities tied directly to a specific business goal. While executive sponsorship and budget certainly matter, starting with a clear understanding of the required capabilities first better positions CX teams to evolve from being mere scorekeepers to becoming true outcome engines.
MA: What is the likely impact that the two different types of CX teams, the modernising minority and the legacy-focused majority, will have on their respective organisations?
RP: The winning CX teams will be those that can successfully sync their insights to product and service decisions, effectively making the CX operations team the connective tissue between customer signals and proactive action.
The ultimate goal for the business is to see fewer ‘watermelon dashboards’—dashboards that show green KPIs outwardly but hide significant internal issues like customer unhappiness and high risk when examined closely. Instead, businesses should focus on prioritised fixes tied directly to business goals such as churn, revenue, and cost. For government or public sector organisations, this might translate to increased compliance, service reach/adoption, or public trust.
More broadly, regardless of the specific business goal, we recommend three key areas of expansion:
- Expand measurement: Move beyond just surveys to include interaction, behavioural, and outcome data.
- Build advanced analytics: Develop diagnostic (what is happening), prescriptive (what we should be doing), and predictive (what impact that action will have) models to identify how experiences affect customer behaviours.
- Develop AI fluency: While CX leaders may not be the ultimate tech decision-makers, they must ensure that CX data flows into and shapes the AI models and operational processes being developed across the organisation that govern real customer interactions.
These steps are challenging, which is why we predict that 15% of teams next year will continue chasing score swings they cannot explain. The ultimate negative impact of this inertia is burnout and a loss of credibility for the CX function.
MA: The report predicts two major scandals stemming from firms acting on AI-led customer research. Can you describe the nature of these anticipated scandals?
RP: The first scandal revolves around CX teams acting on insights generated from synthetic audiences, AI-generated personas or segments or fully AI-moderated interviews that miss crucial human elements.
The accuracy of these models depends heavily on the quality of the underlying data – rubbish data in, rubbish data out. Even the best models can miss subtle cultural signals, irony, humor, or accessibility needs. Acting on biased or tone-deaf insights derived from these models may trigger significant public and consumer backlash.
The second major risk is related to poor data governance in areas with strong, or forthcoming, consumer data regulation (like the EU or Australia). The danger lies in allowing personally identifying information to feed into AI models and outputs. This inadequate data governance and processing would breach existing laws, resulting in compliance violations and a significant erosion of public trust.
MA: Journey mapping is at the heart of most CX programs and initiatives. But you believe two-thirds of teams will abandon journey mapping next year. You argue for a shift to journey management that solves business problems. Can you please elaborate?
RP: I love journey mapping, but the reality is it has earned a self-inflicted stigma because too many efforts stop at the visual artifact—the ‘poster’ on the wall. Most stakeholders within the business don’t dismiss the concept or value of customer journey maps, they dismiss the artifacts that don’t drive action or provide clear direction for employees in service, product development, or marketing.
The answer is journey management. This involves a number of critical steps:
- Create a journey atlas: Establish a high-level view of all the organization’s key journeys.
- Identify lighthouse journeys: Select a few highly important journeys to address, improve, or overhaul.
- Establish cross-functional journey Teams: The ultimate accountability for a journey should not sit in a separate CX team. It must be assigned to a single stakeholder from the business side whose team is directly responsible for that outcome (e.g., someone from the resolution team for a complaints journey). These teams are typically cross-functional and can be either persistent (reshaping the organisation’s structure) or ad-hoc.
- Secure central budget for action: The common denominator for success is having a central ‘break-fix’ or ‘breakthrough’ budget. This ensures the different stakeholders within the journey team have the resources to make necessary improvements—it drives the action bit.
- Use Journeys for Measurement: To make measurement more actionable, layer all data (operational, perception, behavioral, outcome) over the customer journey. This provides a clear start and end point, making it easier to identify and stitch together the necessary data sources.
In short, journey mapping fails when it remains an insight; it succeeds when it becomes the engine for action and cross-functional accountability.
MA: Are there any other predictions or key takeaways you would like to share from the report?
RP: We predict that one-third of firms will harm their Total Experience score by deploying frustrating AI self-service. This is a new flavor of the old chatbot issue, where the primary motivation is often cutting operational costs, not necessarily improving the experience. Organisations fail when they trap customers in endless AI loops without a clear and accessible human handover process for those who need to reach a customer service representative.
We predict that 3 in 10 organisations will finally retire generic website feedback like star ratings in tabs or pop-up surveys. Generative AI tools are fundamentally disrupting how users interact with the internet. Customers are landing on fewer website pages and obtaining information or products directly through generative AI interfaces.
We expect CX programs that rely heavily on website feedback will see a sharp drop in response rates. While there is still a place for targeted feedback, organisations must shift toward complementary methods like behavioural analytics and increasingly rely on the Contact Center to mine conversations, sentiment, and other data for critical insights.