Customer Experience in 2026: Priorities, Pitfalls, & What’s Next

Industry leaders share their top CX priorities for 2026 and the changing customer behaviours brands must prepare for next.

Customer experience is entering a defining phase. 

In 2026, CX will be shaped less by novelty and more by discipline—how effectively organisations build trust, reduce friction, and deliver reliability at scale. As AI becomes embedded across customer journeys, expectations are rising while tolerance for failure is shrinking.

To understand what this next chapter demands, CXM Today spoke with CX, design, product, and technology leaders across industries. 

Their insights highlight where brands must focus in 2026, which CX trends from 2025 proved over-hyped, and how changing customer behaviours are forcing teams to rethink how experience creates and captures value.

Here are their top CX priorities for 2026 and the customer habits brands need to watch next;

CX Priorities for 2026 & Shifting Customer Preferences by Niklas Mortensen, Chief Design Officer at Designit, Europe

Companies need to demonstrate transparent data practices, rather than obsessing over personalisation.

A minority of consumers trust organisations to use AI responsibly, according to Qualtrics‘ 2026 Consumer Experience Trends Report. Paired with research showing that almost half of personalised communications fail, and are perceived as irrelevant or intrusive, companies need to take a hard look at their data collection practices. 

Forrester also predicts that AI-driven privacy breaches will lead to a surge in class-action lawsuits in 2026. Personalisation has become simultaneously essential and broken, which should force a fundamental reconsideration of individualised experiences.

Simplify Experiences Before Adding Features

“Overwhelm” is becoming a measurable business risk shaping how customers interact, and brands compete. Organisations have raced to deploy AI, personalisation engines, omnichannel touchpoints, and real-time notifications simultaneously, creating decision paralysis.

As the hype cycle hits reality, companies should conduct a “complexity audit” of their customer journeys. Every new feature should remove two existing friction points. The winners will be those who help customers cut through noise, not those who add to it.

Start Building for the Real 2026 Customer

The 2026 customer is Gen Z-influenced (even if they’re not Gen Z themselves): they expect tailored convenience, they’ll abandon bad experiences without explanation, they demand privacy transparency, they’re overwhelmed by digital noise, and they’ll switch brands ruthlessly based on single interactions.

The organisations that thrive will be those recognising this moment for what it is: not temporary disruption, but a permanent reordering of how customer experience creates and captures value. Companies that treat design as a strategic operating system, with guardrails, not handcuffs, will capture value others miss.

Silent quitting is now also a consumer trend. 

Qualtrics research reveals that 38% of Gen Z and millennials will give up entirely on a customer service issue if self-service fails, versus only 11% of baby boomers. Consumers are not spending less; they are reallocating with ruthless efficiency.

Gen Z will abandon your brand without ever complaining. Younger consumers don’t complain; they leave. Your satisfaction surveys are measuring ghosts. The generational shift toward “silent churn” will blindside organisations still relying on feedback mechanisms. 

This leads to organisations losing visibility into deteriorating experiences precisely when they need it most.

CX Priorities for 2026 & Shifting Customer Preferences by Joe Byrne, Global CTO at LaunchDarkly

My top priority this year is treating resilience as a core customer experience (CX) metric. Reliability is no longer a backend capability; it directly shapes how customers experience a website. If a customer’s interaction on an app or website is slow, broken or inconsistent, their entire experience is impacted, regardless of intent or effort behind the scenes. 

Second and closely linked is designing software for recovery, not just prevention. As software creation continues to accelerate, failure becomes inevitable rather than exceptional. In this environment, the ability to recover quickly and safely when things go wrong matters more than ever. From a customer’s perspective, recovery time matters far more than root cause. 

Third is shared ownership of experience continuity. When CX, product and engineering teams are operating in silos, resilience suffers. A consistent experience requires alignment around both system behaviour and customer impact. Reliability then becomes a collective responsibility rather than an isolated concern.

Customer tolerance for disruption continues to decline. 

As digital channels have become the primary way customers engage with organisations, reliability is now part of the customer promise, not just an operational concern. Customers judge brands on whether the experience holds up when it matters most, and they remember when it doesn’t. 

As a result, CX strategy in 2026 must shift from retrospective measurement to real-time protection. Organisations need to understand how customer journeys will be affected before changes are implemented, not afterwards. 

CX Priorities for 2026 & Shifting Customer Preferences by Hakob Astabatsyan, Co-Founder & CEO, Synthflow AI

Proving AI works at a production scale. 

The pilot-to-production gap remains the industry’s biggest challenge. Enterprises run successful tests but struggle when moving to millions of conversations under real-world conditions. 

2026 needs operational maturity: consistent latency under load, graceful failure handling, and measuring actual business outcomes rather than demo metrics.

Solving the context problem across channels. 

Customers communicate with brands across voice, chat, email, and messaging apps. The friction comes from systems that don’t talk to each other. 

When someone starts on chat, switches to voice, then follows up via email, they expect the brand to remember. Most enterprises still treat these as separate interactions, requiring rethinking how customer data flows in real-time.

Measuring what customers actually care about. 

Contact centres optimise for average handle time, first-call resolution, and cost per contact. Customers care about one thing: did their problem get solved without hassle? The industry should shift toward outcome-based measurement. 

Did the customer achieve what they needed? How many steps did it take? How much information did they repeat?

Customers now expect immediate resolution, not just immediate response. 

Traditional CX treated speed and quality as a trade-off. That calculus no longer works. The fundamental shift is from reactive problem-solving to proactive context retention. Traditional approaches treated each interaction as isolated – customers explained their situation, got transferred, explained again, maybe escalated, explained a third time. The new expectation: systems remember. 

If a customer calls about a delivery issue on Monday, then follows up via chat on Wednesday, AI should recognise them, recall the context, and continue the conversation. This requires architectural changes. 

CX Priorities for 2026 & Shifting Customer Preferences by Olga Ivanova, Senior Director Customer Service and Customer Experience at inDrive:

Predictable, low-effort experiences across all channels

Customers increasingly value certainty, clarity, and resolution, not just speed. Focus shifts from isolated touchpoints to end-to-end journey reliability.

Automation with accountability, not automation for its own sake

AI and automation must reduce friction and error, while keeping clear ownership. Hybrid models (automation + human judgment) outperform fully automated or fully manual setups.

Trust, safety, and transparency as core CX dimensions

Trust is becoming a measurable CX outcome, not a brand attribute. Safety, fairness, and explainability increasingly influence customer choice and loyalty.

In 2026, customer expectations are driving a shift from reactive support to proactive, seamless experiences. 

Changing customer habits to watch for:

• Customers escalate faster and leave faster
• Lower tolerance for friction; fewer retries before churn
• CX teams must shift from reactive support to early issue detection and prevention
• Self-service is expected, but only if it works
• Customers accept automation only when it genuinely resolves issues
• Poor self-service increases frustration more than human delays
• Trust signals matter more than promises
• Users judge companies by consistency of outcomes, not messaging
• CX teams should track gaps between “expected” and “actual” experience as a core metric

CX Priorities for 2026 & Shifting Customer Preferences by Joanne Stanway, CEO/Co-Founder, Geminai LLC

Listening deeply, doing the work before making assumptions, and staying willing to pivot.

In 2026, customer experience will be defined less by flashy tools and more by how well organisations actually understand the people they serve. That means listening beyond surface-level feedback, investing time in real research, and resisting the urge to lock into rigid strategies too early. 

Just as important is the willingness to pivot when customers tell you something isn’t working. CX is not static, and the brands that succeed are the ones that stay responsive, curious, and adaptable.

Customers now expect intelligent technology paired with knowledgeable, accountable humans.

For 2026, our CX strategy is intentionally proactive and human-led. While we fully embrace AI for insight, scale, and personalisation, our customers expect experienced people to guide the relationship, understand their business goals, and take ownership of outcomes. 

CX can no longer be reactive or ticket-based; it must feel consultative, informed, and personal. The companies that get this right will be the ones that use AI to empower humans, not replace them.

CX Priorities for 2026 & Shifting Customer Preferences by Michael Mattson, Customer Relationship Rescuer and Empathy Leader

By 2026, CX has to stop being the function that only finds problems and become the one that actually changes the system.

Accountability along with awareness.

Today, we are very good at telling stories about what is broken through dashboards, NPS, and journey maps. We are not nearly as good at turning those stories into real, funded change. Customer pain should be treated like a business risk.

If something consistently frustrates or fails people, someone should own it, prioritise it, and be accountable for fixing it.

Design experiences around the human, not just the system.

In 2026, experiences need to be built around how people actually behave, feel, and make decisions. That means stopping the practice of handing customers off between channels, departments, or systems and expecting them to repeat their story each time.

It means recognising that a billing question isn’t just a transaction; it’s often tied to trust, control, or financial anxiety. And it means designing for the emotional weight of moments like cancellation, complaint escalation, or service recovery, not just the operational steps.

Don’t get bogged down by reporting; instead, predict and prevent.

Most CX data today tells us what already went wrong. That is no longer enough. Experience signals, feedback, and operational data should be used to predict where friction will appear and prevent it before it becomes churn, cost, or brand damage. 

CX has to connect human experience directly to revenue, loyalty, and operational health.

Customers no longer just want to be treated kindly after something goes wrong. 

That is now table stakes. They expect companies to design experiences that do not break in the first place, and they expect those experiences to feel relevant, human, and emotionally aware.

That is pushing CX beyond trend reporting, storytelling, and reactive service recovery into experience-led design, operations, and governance. CX has to translate what customers and employees are telling us into changes in policy, systems, and how work actually gets done. 

Just as important, CX roles have to act as dot-connectors across the organisation, bringing together the right teams and resources across the end-to-end journey.