Customer experience is no longer just a brand differentiator. It’s the battleground where customer loyalty is won or lost. Yet, Five9’s 2025 Business Leaders CX Report, which surveyed over 400 global business decision makers, revealed that many companies fall short of delivering service that meets the expectations of their customers.

The research shows a stark misalignment between how business leaders perceive the customer experience and how customers actually experience it. This disconnect not only limits customer service performance, but hinders a company’s ability to build loyalty, retain customers, and stand out in increasingly crowded markets.

Bridging this customer experience gap and staying competitive in today’s loyalty-driven economy requires a fundamental shift in how business leaders view and invest in customer service. The contact center should no longer be viewed as a cost center, but as a strategic driver of customer trust and retention. Embracing this mindset requires investment in the right technologies and a fundamental redesign of service strategies. From AI to 24/7 self-service, business leaders need to ensure their offerings are aligned to actual customer priorities and become capable of delivering meaningful, high-quality experiences at scale.

Here’s what it takes to transform customer experience into a true strategic advantage: 

The Contact Center as a Brand Beacon

Every customer support interaction is a critical opportunity to reinforce your brand and build lasting trust with customers. In some cases, contact centers might be the only direct human interaction that a customer will have with your company.

Every call, chat, or message can be the deciding factor between turning a frustrated customer into a loyal advocate or losing them altogether. In fact, Five9’s research revealed 40% of customers would walk away from a brand after just one negative experience. The brands that will win over the next decade are the ones who understand this and turn their contact centers into loyalty engines, not just troubleshooting hubs.

To drive loyalty and meet heightened expectations for service, businesses need to deliver customer experiences that feel effortless, personal, and deeply human. Achieving this requires a blend of products and service offerings that truly resonate with consumers, paired with cutting-edge technology like AI to elevate every interaction.

Prioritizing What Truly Counts in Customer Service

Organizations today have doubled down on their customer service technology investments, recognizing their critical role in driving long-term business success. However, too many are designing their strategies around internal assumptions rather than actual customer experiences. They are investing in the latest technology without first taking a hard look at what customers actually want.

Five9 research shows that only half (48%) of business leaders think wait time matters to customers, yet 60% of customers rank it as one of their top concerns. Similarly, 56% of customers say they still prefer calling for general support, and that jumps to 74% in high-stakes moments. While customers are reaching for the phone, 38% of businesses expect them to use messaging or social media during urgent moments.

Many brands are also over-indexing on offerings like 24/7 customer support, while simultaneously underestimating the negative impact of disjointed, poorly integrated touchpoints. Half of customers say having to repeat themselves is a key pain point in their service experience, but only 40% of business leaders recognize this need, and a third are still delivering fragmented experiences across channels.

Interestingly, what customers and brands tend to agree on is the promise of AI to improve the customer journey – when done right. Ninety one percent of business decision makers expect AI to revolutionize the customer experience and 72% of consumers are interested in using AI agents if the technology is used effectively.

Unfortunately, many brands appear to be struggling to leverage automation at the right moments and in the right ways, and as a result, AI hasn’t fully lived up to expectations yet. Done correctly, however, AI has the potential to be a game-changing asset.

AI as a Strategic Asset to Fuel the Loyalty Engine

AI is already widely deployed in contact centers. 81% of businesses surveyed by Five9 reported using AI in some way. Among the business decision-makers driving the AI charge, nearly all report using the technology to power self-service (96%) and support live agents (94%).

The prevailing use case for AI in customer service today is efficiency. Reducing wait times, lowering cost to serve, and answering customer inquiries quickly, are gains that matter to the customer. However, if the main goal is to move people through the funnel faster, we’re missing AI’s greatest value: building customer loyalty and trust at scale.

Great customer service is fast, but it's also intuitive, emotionally intelligent, and human. When used strategically, AI can elevate both automated experiences as well as human interactions. It can anticipate customer needs, route inquiries intelligently, and act at the connective tissue across systems, channels, and data. Arguably and most critically, AI frees up human agents from repetitive, low-value tasks, allowing them to handle the complex and emotionally charged moments that truly matter for building deep customer loyalty.

With the right strategy, AI can enable companies to operationalize what customers care about most. It turns fragmented service into cohesive experiences, enhances the human side of service that customers expect, and enables brands to deliver high-quality, personalized support consistently.

Turning Service into Strategy

The contact center is the core of modern customer experience. To win and retain customers, business leaders must recognize its role as a brand beacon and align their strategies with customer-defined priorities in mind.