01
Research mosaic
Index slides, ROI notes and the journey paper.
Quality still sliding, globally
275,000 customers rated 469 brands. Twenty-one percent declined; ten elite names held the top 5%.
Five stars buy trust and repurchase
A 5-star experience makes consumers 2.9× more likely to trust and 3× more likely to recommend.
Trust is the agentic bottleneck
Seventy-two percent trust companies less than a year ago. Nearly three-quarters want to know when they are talking to an AI agent.
The journey paper that still frames CX
Lemon and Verhoef’s customer-journey synthesis remains the academic spine for experience research — touchpoints, social, and the firm’s role.
02
The numbers
Pulse figures from the latest CX research.
03
Trending
Agentic AI, Trendsetters and synthetic customers.
Zendesk’s human-centric AI playbook
Trendsetters post 22% higher retention and 49% higher cross-sell when AI feels human.
Gartner: 80% of common issues by 2029
Agentic AI to resolve most routine service without a human — and cut ops costs ~30%.
Bain’s synthetic customers arrive
Generative AI models of shoppers join NPS Prism — loyalty maths meets synthetic panels.
04
On YouTube
Index walkthroughs and NPS as a system.
Forrester CX Index: Michelle Yaiser
Forrester’s own walkthrough of the CX Index method and what brands get wrong.
What is the Net Promoter System?
Fred Reichheld on NPS as a management system — not just a survey score.
The Future of XM
Qualtrics on experience management when AI sits in the feedback loop.
Match Group on human-centric AI
A Zendesk CX Trends 2025 case: empathy traits in agents, not just automation.
CX investment ROI: the business case
Jeannie Walters and Mark Raffan on how to sell CX spend upstairs.
05
Look at next
Scouts and stacks — a reading list.
Two short notes if you are building a CX research stack — not a syllabus, a reading list.
