Types of customer loyalty: What drives consumers to keep buying
Research from SAP Emarsys reveals the different kinds of customer loyalty drivers and how they're changing.
Despite the vast amount of change in the ways we buy and sell, what customers want when they purchase from remains the same: a great customer experience (this applies to both B2B and B2C). If your brand can only offer what amounts to a subpar experience, your customers are likely to go elsewhere — and not quietly. They’ll also warn family, friends, and social media followers not to buy from you. No brand can afford that – and the CX trends in 2025 reflect this reality.
With CX on the decline, many brands are at risk. According to Forrester’s US Customer Experience Index, CX quality reached an all-time low in 2024.
Forrester cited several factors for the decline, including a lack of seamless experiences, disappointing digital CX with chatbots, and consumers worried about their finances and the economy.
How are brands honing in on these factors and upgrading their CX? And what are the top customer experience trends in 2025?
7 customer experience trends for 2025 and beyond: CX tactics to drive customer loyalty
The top CX tactics in 2025 don’t just employ the latest technology; they WORK, and have staying power to evolve and adapt to changing customer needs.
Here are seven customer experience trends we’ll see well into 2025 and beyond:
- Customer loyalty and rewards programs
- Hyper-personalization
- Voice interaction
- Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) fusion
- Omnichannel harmony
- AI and machine learning-powered customer service
- Proactive customer engagement
1. Ramping up customer loyalty programs
Winning and keeping customers is challenging, but loyalty and rewards programs provide an attractive incentive for customers to stay. These programs, which typically include assorted discounts, rebates, and other perks for returning customers, offer a delightful cocktail of community, ease, uniqueness, and value that make customers feel warm and fuzzy, ensuring they’ll be back.
According to a PwC survey, 54% of chief marketing officers increased their budget for customer loyalty and retention this year.
In 2025, expect more brands to focus on this customer experience trend in order to drive long-term growth. Customers who feel appreciated by a brand are more likely to recommend that brand on social media, subscribe to its newsletters, opt-in for promotions, and make repeat purchases.
In a world where customers are inundated with buying options and can swiftly jump ship to another shop, this level of brand advocacy is worth more than gold.
By learning what’s driving their customers’ loyalty – what’s fusing that deeper connection customers have with your brand – and mapping their journey, leaders can uncover a goldmine of potential growth in 2025.
2. Customer experience 2025: The era of hyper-personalization
Customers don’t just want a tailor-made, personalized experience with your brand – they EXPECT it.
Personalization has trended up to hyper-personalization— a “segment-of-one” approach allowing brands to target a single individual with key messages that are relevant to them. Unique customer data like psychographics or engagements allow brands to offer customers hyper-personalized “just-for-you” experiences.
An overwhelming majority of consumers (71%) expect personalized experiences from brands and 76% are frustrated with a lack of personalization, a McKinsey & Company study found.
Relevant experiences that offer customers something they really want generate sales and likely, unwavering customer loyalty. Sixty-one percent of CMOs view personalizing the customer experience as the top priority for activating loyalty, the PwC survey found.
Keep in mind, though, that creating an app or hyper-personalized content is only half the task. It also needs to be intuitive to the user and easy to navigate in order to produce a positive customer experience.
3. Voice interaction emerges as a top CX trend in 2025
Voice technology is expected to grow to $50 billion by 2029, meaning voice commerce (using voice recognition technology to make online purchases) and virtual digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are poised to play a more significant role in 2025 for customer experience.
With 40% of U.S. internet users owning a voice assistant they use monthly, e-commerce brands will need to optimize their sites for voice commerce to stay ahead of the curve.
Voice technology allows brands to offer their customers an exceptional experience at scale, but to get there, sophisticated applications need to be implemented so that robots can understand and interpret humans when they speak naturally. Developers are helping optimize this technology for more seamless voice interactions by combining natural language processing, conversational AI, machine learning, and natural language understanding.
An example of voice technology enhancing CX is the Mercedes me connect voice app from luxury automaker Mercedes-Benz. It uses Alexa to remotely unlock doors, start the engine, control pre-conditioning the temperature, and send a point of interest to your navigation system– all before you open the door. It can also locate the car when needed or access information like the amount of fuel left or the maintenance schedule.
4. VR and AR trend: Digital CX comes to life
The fusion of virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) will continue to be a top customer experience trend in 2025, redefining CX by creating stunning, interactive immersive experiences that inform, delight, and convert customers.
The number of consumers worldwide who use augmented reality (AR) frequently will grow to 4.3 billion by 2025, up from 1.5 billion in 2021, according to Statista.
These experiences considerably enhance product storytelling, merging digital and physical worlds to highlight product use cases and value in a unique way. The release of Apple’s Vision Pro device earlier this year is part of the AR-VR trend, which has spawned spatial commerce.
A standout example of this trend is Malfy Gin, which used AR to craft a 360-degree immersive experience, blending real photography with imaginative imagery to transport consumers to the Amalfi Coast in Italy.
Omnichannel customer engagement: 4 inescapable truths
The friction is REAL when it comes to the modern buyer’s journey. Fortunately, there’s an omnichannel solution.
5. Perfecting omnichannel experiences for better CX in 2025
With the number of customer touchpoints constantly growing, an omnichannel strategy is no longer an option, but a requirement. Brands need a unified and consistent approach to managing their integrated channels and the customers who use them.
Whether in-store, online, text messaging, using an app, or talking to a real, live agent on the phone, customers want to engage with a brand (and receive a response) via their communication channel of choice.
Brands that invest in seamless, omnichannel experiences reap both top-line and bottom-line benefits, with satisfied customers 3.6x more likely to buy additional products and services, a Deloitte study found. Better CX reduces costs and helps brands focus on these customers with a 1.6x higher lifetime value.
Although opportunities for omnichannel engagement are fairly untapped, we anticipate that changing in 2025– especially in terms of its capabilities when paired with AI. As an ally in your quest for effective omnichannel engagement, AI’s power lies in its ability to consolidate and activate customer, sales and product data at scale.
For brands willing to dig into their data and mine it for customer insights to improve their customer journey, the rewards could be well worth the time spent. That’s because customers who engage in omnichannel shopping tend to spend more money than those who only shop through a single channel. They also tend to be more loyal than digital-only shoppers – hence the reason omnichannel experiences are a crucial CX trend in 2025.
6. CX 2025: Customer service improves thanks to AI and machine learning
At the heart of good customer experience is top-flight service that provides customers with fast responses and resolutions. Brands today are increasingly using AI chatbots to deliver that speedy service, a CX trend that will continue to grow in 2025.
That’s okay with consumers, as long as the AI really does the job. One survey found that most consumers (73.5%) are comfortable with brands using AI to speed service via their social channels. They weren’t as enthusiastic about AI-generated content in general.
With AI technology advancing rapidly, expect to see brands using more intelligent chatbots, predictive analytics, and automation to generate quick, accurate responses to customer inquiries.
Also expect to see brands infuse the entire customer journey with AI. According to a Capgemini survey released late last year, nearly 60% of organizations are integrating generative AI into their marketing efforts.
7. Anticipating needs for better customer engagement
No longer willing to use the “wait and see” approach in assessing the needs of their customers, more proactive brands are now anticipating needs, deepening connections and optimizing customer journeys BEFORE they hear from the customers.
A Gartner study found that only 13% of 6,000 customers reported experiencing any kind of proactive customer service. The study also found that proactive engagement boosts a brand’s NPS and customer satisfaction score by a full point.
By using customer insights gained through surveys, social media monitoring, and feedback channels, behavioral data and qualitative insights can then be analyzed to preemptively solve pain points before they happen.
Brands taking the initiative to proactively reach out to customers, flagging and fixing potential issues before they arise, can earn high marks in customer satisfaction, loyalty, brand perception, efficiency, and innovation.
Banking on customer experience
To be sure, none of this is easy. Customer experience has always been a tough job, and with so much rapid-fire change in the digital environment, it’s only getting harder.
Taking it back to the beginning, how can you avoid becoming known as a company with bad CX? It boils down to five main criteria:
- Speed: Quick service and prompt responses are non-negotiable for brands today. In fact, speed has become the top factor in CX.
- Convenience: Easy and accessible interactions with brands help make CX seamless and stress-free for customers.
- Consistency: Reliable and uniform experiences across all touchpoints are essential for building trust and loyalty, two qualities that are increasingly harder to come by.
- Friendliness: Warm and approachable communications and interactions foster positive connections and customer loyalty.
- Human touch: Combining automation with human interactions personalizes CX, helping customers feel seen and understood.
Getting CX right is critical for the bottom line, and companies know this. In an IDC survey of 1,000 business leaders, nearly one-third said improving customer satisfaction is their top priority followed by improving CX — and then revenue growth.
By leveraging customer data insights and advanced technologies, companies can foster lasting connections to drive sustainable growth.
