CX for Success: How to Put Experience at the Heart of Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Experience has become critical to how businesses attract and retain customers. Brand recognition and reputation alone are no longer enough. To stand out, win loyalty, and secure repeat business, companies must adopt a holistic view of how customers interact with their brand, and ensure each individual touchpoint contributes to lasting satisfaction.
Delivering genuine value through these interactions is increasingly challenging. Customer expectations are continually rising, while tolerance for unmet expectations is shrinking. In one survey, 96% of consumers said a negative experience impacts their loyalty to any one brand, while 86% said they would look elsewhere after just one or two poor experiences. In another study, two-thirds said they would quit a business if their experience wasn’t personalised.
A user-friendly website on its own is no longer sufficient. Today’s consumers demand immediate, immersive, and consistently excellent experiences, whether they’re first-time visitors or long-time customers. They expect businesses to recognise them and anticipate their needs across all interactions.
This may sound overwhelming, but the fundamentals of satisfaction, convenience, choice, flexibility, attention, consistency, and trust remain unchanged. What has shifted are the benchmarks for “good” and “great,” driven by what technology has made possible. Thankfully, technology also offers the solutions, most importantly of all in the form of artificial intelligence (AI).
AI is revolutionising digital experience by delivering personalisation at scale, maintaining consistency across omnichannel environments, and safeguarding data. For long-term customer experience (CX) success, businesses must start to reimagine service delivery through the lens of AI. In this article, we explore how.
Mastering the Modern Customer Journey
Today’s customer journeys are characterised by complexity and variety. They span physical stores, websites, apps, marketplaces, social media and more. Consumers not only use all these platforms, but they also expect to mix and match during a single shopping experience. Checking prices on a smartphone while in-store or buying from Amazon after browsing a brand’s website is now routine.
A decade ago, a seminal Harvard Business Review study of over 46,000 shoppers revealed that customers using the most channels spent 10% more and had retention rates of 89%. That has set the tone for ‘omnichannel’ customer journeys ever since. But from the customer’s perspective, expectations around omnichannel have evolved. They now want transitions between channels to be effortless and seamless. Over half (55%) are willing to spend more on convenient formats, while 46% prioritise quick interactions.
This creates a dilemma. More channels mean more complexity, which runs counter to the ease-of-use ethos. A customer expecting a ‘seamless’ journey is unlikely to be impressed by having to start again every time they switch from one channel to another. But how do you make multiple channels work as one?
Solving this rests on two critical elements: robust architecture to connect data and systems, and a deep understanding of how customers navigate their journeys. AI has a key role to play.
Traditional feedback methods are giving way to Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs powered by AI, offering real-time insights into behaviour and sentiment. In 2025, 37.5% of businesses plan to incorporate VoC into CX, and 43.7% already use AI sentiment analysis.
By tracking users in real time as they move across devices and platforms, and gathering data about their preferences and expectations, this kind of intelligence is proving invaluable in helping businesses create more satisfying, seamless experiences. In addition, predictive analytics helps to forecast when and how a customer might resume their journey, enabling proactive engagement through personalised prompts and offers.
Read about how Key Element helped a global automotive brand with a data analysis project aimed at unlocking new business value from customer behaviour insights.
Personalisation: Meeting Expectations at the Individual Level
Delivering both choice and convenience is difficult because preferences differ from person to person. There is no universal customer journey. Each one is unique. So, building the ‘perfect’ CX means understanding what every individual wants, and then delivering against their expectations.
We are, of course, in the realm of personalisation here. And as if things weren’t tough enough for businesses already, the expectations around what even counts as personalisation have shifted, too.
Until recently, digital personalisation typically meant segmenting customers into groups based on shared characteristics and tailoring content accordingly. But today’s consumers want truly individualised experiences – and they know it’s possible. McKinsey describes this as the “next frontier” of personalisation. According to their research, 71% of consumers expect personalised interactions, and 76% express frustration when they’re lacking. Zendesk also reports that 61% of customers expect more personalisation due to AI.
AI is pivotal to the evolution of personalisation because of its ability to collect and analyse behavioural data in real time and at scale, allowing brands to adapt their interactions instantly. This responsiveness is crucial to meeting evolving customer needs.
Creating unique experiences at scale also presents a massive content challenge. Each customer might require different messages, product recommendations, formats, or accessibility features. Until recently, this level of dynamic content generation was simply not feasible. But now, Generative AI can produce text, visuals, and even videos on demand, informed by the real-time insights gathered on each individual.
We’re already seeing AI solutions emerging that combine all of these capabilities. Agentic AI brings together in-depth customer analytics, Generative AI and the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities that fuel AI chatbots and smart assistants to create what some experts call a more ‘human-like’ kind of AI service bot – one that can interact conversationally, problem solve complex tasks, make decisions and initiate actions independently and, crucially, learn from interactions moment to moment to constantly tailor the service provided to current need. This is seen as offering a route to yet another level of hyper-specific personalisation as we move forward.
Consistency and Trust: The Cornerstones of CX
Consumers want experiences that feel personal and unique. Yet in a paradox that is central to delivering great CX, they also value the consistent and familiar. How do businesses square this circle?
Consistency underpins convenience. Customers expect seamless transitions between channels with uniform messaging and a familiar design. Ensuring this consistency is a content coordination challenge. Every blog post, email, chatbot response, and promotional message must reflect the brand identity.
AI helps by maintaining brand coherence. Generative AI tools trained on brand guidelines, pricing policies, and compliance frameworks can automatically validate and produce consistent messaging across all content channels.
Consistency also supports trust. In a fragmented, competitive market, loyalty is fragile. Over half of consumers say they’re less loyal due to bad experiences. To foster loyalty, brands must establish trust – not just in their products, but in the overall experience.
AI contributes to trust through data orchestration, predictive engagement, and tailored experiences. However, data itself presents a trust issue. Businesses rely on customers to share information to power personalisation. Fortunately, 48% of consumers are open to sharing their data in exchange for better experiences. But they must trust that it will be used responsibly and securely.
To earn this trust, brands must be transparent about their data practices and demonstrate value. Open communication is key. But scaling these dialogues so they happen on a one-to-one, personal level is difficult. Here again, AI offers a solution.
Next-generation AI agents are evolving into frontline brand representatives. These bots can manage one-on-one conversations at scale, delivering consistent, informative messages about data use, privacy, and benefits. And consumers are responding positively – 64% say they trust AI more when it interacts in a “human-like” way.
Next Steps
In an era where customer expectations are soaring, experience is what makes or breaks loyalty. CX has therefore become central to every digital marketing strategy. Success depends on delivering value through convenience, personalisation, consistency, and trust, across every touchpoint.
As a leading London-based digital marketing agency, mapping out world-class customer experience (CX) journeys and building the technology that delivers great end-user experiences (UX) is a key part of what we do at Key Element. Contact our friendly team today to find out more.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is customer experience (CX) more important than brand recognition today?
Customer experience is now the key differentiator in competitive markets because consumers prioritise how a brand makes them feel across every interaction. A seamless, personalised, and consistent experience fosters trust and loyalty more effectively than traditional brand recognition alone.
How does AI improve customer personalisation?
AI can be effectively deployed to analyse customer data in real time. The insights gathered from this data can then be used to action individualised experiences through tailored content, recommendations, and interactions. The key is that AI can do all of this automatically and at scale, opening the door to truly individualised experiences for large customer bases.
What are omnichannel journeys, and why do they matter?
Omnichannel journeys involve customers interacting with a brand across multiple platforms (e.g., mobile, web, in-store, social media). Consumers expect these experiences to be seamless and consistent. Brands that support this behaviour see higher engagement, loyalty, and revenue.
What is Voice of the Customer (VoC), and how does AI support it?
Voice of the Customer programs collect and analyse feedback to understand customer needs and expectations. AI enhances VoC by processing large volumes of data in real time to identify patterns and generate actionable insights to improve CX.
What is agentic AI, and how is it different from traditional chatbots?
In the context of CX and customer service, Agentic AI refers to next-generation virtual assistants that combine advanced analytics, natural language processing, and Generative AI capabilities. Unlike basic chatbots, the latest AI agents can make decisions independently, solve complex problems, learn from interactions, and engage in personalised conversations that feel more ‘human’.
How can businesses maintain consistency in their customer experiences?
Consistency in CX is achieved through unified content strategies and AI tools that ensure brand messaging, design, and tone are uniform across channels. AI can also validate and automate content creation to maintain coherence while personalising at scale.
Ready to learn more about achieving world-class CX consistently across all your channels? Get in touch with our team today to find out what we can do for you.
Matthew Cowell
