Discover CXM Today’s experts, sharing insights on 2025’s CX trends—from AI-driven personalisation and loyalty to digital transformation, customer-centric design, and the evolving expectations shaping exceptional experiences.
As customer expectations continued to rise, organisations faced growing pressure to deliver experiences that were meaningful. In this environment, guidance from seasoned industry experts became more important than ever.
At CXM Today, we collaborated with an exceptional group of contributors who shaped the future of customer experience, data, and technology in 2025.
These leaders brought deep, hands-on expertise across CX, CRM, loyalty, martech, AI, ecommerce, design, psychology, and digital transformation—offering practical insights grounded in real-world impact.
Together, their perspectives explored the most critical themes influencing the year, from AI-driven personalisation and data activation to empathy-led design, CX measurement, content strategy, and evolving customer behaviour.
What connected these contributors was a shared commitment to advancing customer-centric thinking. Their work didn’t just reflect where the industry was heading—it helped define it.
We are proud to showcase the experts who informed, challenged, and inspired the CX community throughout 2025.
Adam Boelke
Adam, founder of Alignment Advantage Group Consulting, is a transformational operations leader with over 30 years of experience in customer service and support for Fortune 500 companies and others. He has held senior roles at Porch Group and Home Alliance, driving results through people-focused strategies.
Amy Gleave is a digital marketing professional with strong experience across branding, design, motion, and digital strategy. As Digital Marketing Manager at Dawn, she leads end-to-end marketing while bringing prior expertise in sustainability, CSR, and brand leadership from Momentum Instore.
Article by Amy: Why A DIY Approach to Design Degrades Your Brand
Andrew Miles
Andrew Miles is the Chief Product Officer at Hollrs, with 15+ years of experience scaling AI-driven, data-rich platforms across SaaS and consumer apps. He brings deep technical expertise and customer focus, and previously served as SVP of Product for Reporting, Analytics, and Partnerships at Forsta.
Article by Andrew: Why Listening at Scale Starts with Zero-Party Data
Ann Tarasewicz
Ann is a digital advertising leader with deep expertise in programmatic media. As CEO at Axis, she leads the development of a proprietary platform connecting advertisers and suppliers, specialising in in-app and CTV advertising across Tier 1 markets to drive high-quality demand and campaign performance.
Article by Ann: Lessons in Building a Future-Proof Adtech Company
Anna Forbes
Anna is the RVP for Northern Europe at DoubleVerify, bringing over 20 years of experience in the ad tech industry. She has led teams across Europe and the US at companies including The Trade Desk and Xandr, with a focus on long-term client strategy and scaling businesses from start-up to maturity.
Benjamin is Co-Founder & CEO of Formsort, an online form builder for companies with advanced data protection features. Previously, he founded and scaled digital mortgage lender Better.com and began his career as an investor at The Blackstone Group, bringing deep experience across high-growth businesses.
Article by Benjamin: Personalisation vs Privacy: Where’s the Debate Going?
David O’Hearns
David is Managing Director of Dawn Creative, bringing nearly 30 years of experience building distinctive, high-performing brands. He leads the agency in helping ambitious businesses achieve clear positioning, bold design, and consistent brand experiences that drive growth across every channel.
For over three decades, Dennis, better known as “The Global Voice of CX,” has dedicated himself to revolutionising customer experience (CX), helping global powerhouses like FedEx, AT&T, McDonald’s, and Wells Fargo reshape their customer relationships and drive growth.
Article by Dennis: CX Fatigue is Real, Try Smarter Engagement
Eduardo Ribeiro
Eduardo is a Brand Design Lead at Qonto, specialising in brand strategy, design leadership, AI, and cross-functional collaboration. With experience across agencies, startups, and the tech sector, he leads initiatives that connect brand, marketing, and product to deliver cohesive and impactful brand narratives.
Article by Eduardo: Brand Identity is The Ultimate Marketing Message
Frans Riemersma
Frans is the Founder of MartechTribe and a recognised martech strategist with over two decades of experience. He has designed and optimised marketing technology stacks for global organisations, including HP, Adidas, Audi, BASF, Unilever, Philips, ABN AMRO, IKEA, Standard Bank, SWIFT, and Volvo.
Fraser is the Founder of ItStacksUp, a platform helping entrepreneurs plan, automate, and execute business strategies. An author of 20+ books, he specialises in AI-driven workflows, martech stacks, and automation, and created the Skillutions® Matrix to combine human meta-skills with AI for sustainable growth.
With over 25 years of leadership experience, Hector is a seasoned expert in marketing and CX across industries, including insurance, retail, entertainment, and healthcare. He specialises in data-driven strategy, digital transformation, and the use of AI to enhance engagement, loyalty, and operational efficiency.
Article by Hector: The Future of VoC Isn’t Data, It’s Activation
Indira Narayanan
Indira Narayanan is MD of Designit India (Part of Wipro) and a 30-year industry veteran. She brings experience leading large-scale enterprise implementations and managing diverse technology practices with full P&L responsibility, focusing on customer satisfaction, capability building, and cost efficiency.
Article by Indira: Why Metrics Alone Fall Short in the Golden Quarter
Jack Kerr
Jack is Director at Appdome, where he works closely with development and security teams to integrate advanced mobile app protection into CI/CD workflows. He focuses on simplifying app security, enabling organisations to deploy resilient, protected mobile applications without disrupting development speed or release cycles.
James Riess leads loyalty and CRM at Merkle and is a recognised expert in CX and loyalty marketing. With over two decades of leadership experience, he helps clients drive transformation through data-driven strategies, fosters growing relationships, leads cross-functional teams, and identifies business opportunities.
Article by James: Growth by Design: Media, CRM and Loyalty Aligned
Jared Koll
Jared is the CX Advisor and Marketing Director at Outsource Consultants, with over 12 years of experience in digital marketing. He specialises in demand generation, sales enablement, and SEO, driving measurable impact through net new ARR growth and strong sales pipeline contributions.
Article by Jared: How Top CX Leaders Overcome Budget, Risk, and Time Barriers
Joe Evea
Joe is SVP of Advertising and Retail Media EMEA at Titan OS, leading the transformation of TV advertising across Europe. With experience spanning radio, television, and magazine publishing, he has successfully driven commercial growth and innovation at Bauer, ITV, and emap Advertising internationally.
Karen is a consumer psychologist at esure Group, specialising in understanding user behaviour and translating insight into action. She helps organisations bridge the gap between consumers and businesses by designing user-centred experiences that improve engagement, strengthen trust, and drive outcomes.
Article by Karen: The Psychology Behind Smarter Insurance Choices
Kat Stroud
Kat Stroud is a Senior CX Consultant at Forsta with over 12 years of experience helping organisations design and deliver impactful customer experience programmes. Known for her strategic approach and passion for aligning CX with business goals, she works closely with clients to drive meaningful change.
Article by Kat: 5 CX Dashboard Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Marleen Beevers
Marleen is a European fashion psychologist & the Founder of Satisfashion, a consultancy combining neuroscience and psychology. She helps brands optimise first impressions by using visual and sensory cues to influence perception, emotion, and decision-making across physical and digital customer touchpoints.
Article by Marleen: First Impressions! Brands Can Win or Lose in a Split Second
Max Parker
Max is a CX Specialist at Netigate, focusing on customer feedback, experience measurement, and insight-led improvement. He works with organisations to turn data into actionable insights, helping teams understand customer needs, optimise journeys, and deliver experience improvements across touchpoints.
Michael is Chief Empathy Officer at Walk a Mile CX and a member of the XM Global Collaborative and Contact Center AI Association. As a CX catalyst, he blends emotional intelligence, empathy, and strategic technology to help organisations build meaningful connections and deliver customer experiences.
Article by Michael: Are Brands Empathy-Led or Efficiency-Obsessed?
Michel Stevens
Michel is the Managing Partner of goCX, Course Director at CX Master Academy, and host of the Table 7 podcast. He is a recognised customer experience leader, working with executives and frontline teams to embed customer-centric strategies that drive organisational transformation and long-term value.
Michelle is a CX thought leader, advisor, and bilingual speaker with 30 years’ experience across business, marketing, and communications. A long-time CX practitioner, she has led multinational transformations integrating voice of customer, analytics, engagement, governance, culture, and collaboration globally.
Article by Michelle: Stop the Survey Madness: Three CX Mistakes Costing Trust
Michelle Spaul
Michelle is a CX consultant and founder of Delta Swan, helping organisations turn customer insight into action. Since 2021, she has served as a CX Advisor at TribeCX. With decades of cross-industry experience, she focuses on practical, people-first strategies that deliver measurable, lasting impact.
Molly is Founder and Executive Producer of Blue Door Productions. She leads the creation of viral social content & feature-length documentaries, overseeing projects and teams from ideation and development through production, distribution, and publication across digital platforms worldwide audiences.
Article by Molly: How to Build Brand Loyalty with YouTube Storytelling
Neal Woodson
Neal is an advocate for human-centred service and leadership with over 30 years’ experience across retail, hospitality, education, and corporate training. An author, his books include Giving a $#!+ and The Uncomplicated Coach, focusing on practical leadership, service, and meaningful impact for organisations.
Peter is the EMEA Field CDO, Data Streaming Platform at Confluent, with 30+ years of experience in strategy, transformation, infrastructure, & service delivery. He helps organisations maximise technology value by enabling streaming data platforms that deliver earlier insights and future-proof architectures for analytics and AI.
Article by Peter: How GenAI Leverages Data for Retail Success
Rasmus Houlind
Rasmus is Chief Experience Officer at Agillic with over a decade of experience in digital marketing, automation, and loyalty. He has advised brands including Red Cross, PureGym DK, Tivoli, Matas, and Sportmaster, and is the author of three books on personalisation and customer-centric marketing globally.
Article by Rasmus: When Personalisation Backfires: The 4 Warning Signs You Miss
Richard Hanscott
Richard joined Esendex (Part of Commify) as CEO in January 2020 and has focused on our mission to make business communication brilliant. His priorities are to expand the existing business, serving 45,000 customers, and to develop the next generation of messaging services to serve the fast-expanding global market.
Article by Richard: The Return Trap: Fixing Retail’s Most Expensive Mistake
Scott D. Dustin
Scott is the Head of Ecommerce at 4ocean PBC, with over 20 years of experience in retail and ecommerce. He leads digital commerce across Amazon, Shopify DTC, and major marketplaces, driving revenue growth while aligning performance with 4ocean’s mission to remove ocean plastic through measurable execution.
Sue is an ecommerce Industry Consultant at AppsFlyer with 10 years of experience. She advises businesses across EMEA and LATAM on mobile market trends, app growth, measurement, and retention strategies, helping brands optimise performance, scale sustainably, and succeed in markets.
Article by Sue: 7 Trends Set to Define Ecommerce in 2025
Sue Duris
Sue is Co-Founder & Principal Consultant of M4 Communications, a CX and marketing consultancy that helps organisations embed customer-centricity and drive sustainable growth. A CX strategist, she partners with leaders to design and scale programmes that fuel loyalty, retention, and competitive advantage.
Tom is a film director and editor known for original, purpose-led storytelling. Founder of Wild Films, he scaled the studio to 20 people, leading complex productions for sports and tech brands. As the former Chief Creative Officer at &above, he also delivered TVCs, films, and documentaries for Revolut.
Will trains thousands of marketers annually through institutions including the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the American Marketing Association. With agency experience across global brands, he is an authority, host of the Ahead of the Game podcast, and author with Prestel.
Article by Will: Essential AI Apps Toolkit for Managing Your Brand’s Social Media
Amplitude is a product analytics platform, enabling businesses to track visitors with the help of collaborative analytics. The platform leverages the capabilities of 
Zoho Social, a part of Zoho’s suite of 50+ products, is a comprehensive social media management platform for businesses and agencies. The Zoho Social dashboard includes a robust set of features, such as Publishing Calendar, Bulk Scheduler, and Approval Management to offer businesses all the essential social media publishing tools. Its monitoring tools help enterprises track and respond to relevant social conversations.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 represents a robust cloud-based CRM solution with features such as pipeline assessment, relationship analytics, and conversational intelligence. It utilises AI-powered insights to provide actionable intelligence via predictive analytics, lead scoring, sentiment analysis, etc. Currently, Microsoft operates in 190 countries and is made up of more than 220,000 employees worldwide.
HubSpot is an inbound marketing, sales, and customer service software provider, offering robust CRM and automation solutions. Some of its products include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Operations Hub, Content Hub, Commerce Hub, Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software. Guided by its inbound methodology, HubSpot enables companies to prioritise innovation and customer success.
Monday.com is a project management software company, offering a cloud-based platform that enables businesses 
Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks is a global AI-powered business software provider. Its tech stack includes a scalable and comprehensive suite for IT, customer support, sales, and marketing teams, ensuring value for immediate business impact. Its product portfolio includes Customer Service Suite, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshcaller, Freshsuccess, and Freshservice. Freshservice for Business Teams has helped several global organisations to enhance their operational efficiency.
Talkdesk offers an innovative AI-powered customer-centric tech stack to its global partners. The company provides generative AI integrations, delivering industry-specific solutions to its customers. Talkdesk CX Cloud and Industry Experience Clouds utilise modern machine learning and language models to enhance contact centre efficiency and client satisfaction.
The company offers comprehensive cloud-based solutions, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Gaming Consoles, Microsoft Advertising, Copilot, among other things, to help organisations offer enhanced CX and ROI. Its generative-AI-powered speech and voice recognition solutions,such as Cortana and Azure Speech Services empowers developers to build intelligent applications.
IBM is a global hybrid cloud and AI-powered 
Uniphore is an enterprise-class, AI-native company that was incubated in 2008. Its enterprise-class multimodal AI and data platform unifies all elements of voice, video, text and data by leveraging Generative AI, Knowledge AI, Emotion AI and workflow automation. Some of its products include U-Self Serve, U-Assist, U-Capture, and U-Analyze. Its Q for Sale is a conversational intelligence software that guides revenue teams with AI-powered insights, offering clarity on how to effectively keep prospects engaged.
Google Cloud accelerates every organisation’s ability to digitally transform its business. Its enterprise-grade solutions leverage modern technology to solve the most criticial business problems 
8×8 offers out-of-the-box contact centre solutions, assisting all-size businesses to efficiently meet customer needs and preferences. It offers custom CRM integrations support and integrates effortlessly with third-party CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, and more. Offering global support in all time zones & development teams in 5 continents, its patented geo-routing solution ensures consistent voice quality.
Sprinklr is a comprehensive enterprise software company for all customer-focused functions. With advanced AI, Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform lets organisations offer human experiences to every customer, every time, across any modern channel.
Upland offers a comprehensive suite of contact centre and customer service solutions with products including InGenius, Panviva, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers. InGenius enables organisations to connect their existing phone system with CRM, further enhancing agent productivity. Panviva provides compliant and omnichannel capabilities for highly regulated industries. Whereas, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers are its AI-powered solutions, 
Hootsuite, headquartered in Vancouver, is a social media management platform that streamlines the process of managing multiple social media accounts. Some of its core offerings include social media content planning and publishing, audience engagement tools, analytics and social advertising. Its easy-to-integrate capabilities help marketing teams to schedule and publish social media posts efficiently.
Brandwatch enables businesses to build and scale the optimal strategy for their clients with intuitive, use-case-focused tools that are easy and quick to master. Bringing together consumer intelligence and social media management, the company helps its users react to the trends that matter, collaborate on data-driven content, shield the brand from threats and manage all the social media channels at scale.
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirement for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its platform helps play an essential role in managing different digital content or assets to improve customer happiness. Its easy-to-optimise content gives users appropriate marketing streams, ensuring product awareness.
Salesforce-owned Tableau is an AI-powered analytics and business intelligence platform, offering the breadth and depth of capabilities that serve the requirements of global enterprises in a seamless, integrated experience. Marketers can utilise generative AI models, AI-powered predictions, natural language querying, and recommendationsons.
Contentsquare is a cloud-based digital experience analytics platform, helping brands track billions of digital interactions, and turn those digital 
Zoho Corporation offers innovative and tailored software to help leaders grow their business. Zoho’s 55+ products aid sales and marketing, support and collaboration, finance, and recruitment requirements. Its customer analytics capabilities come with a conversational feature, Ask Zia. It enables users to ask questions and get insights in the form of reports and widgets in real-time.
Fullstory is a behavioural data platform, helping C-suite leaders make informed decisions by injecting digital behavioural data into its analytics stack. Its patented technology uncovers the power of quality behavioural data at scale, transforming every digital visit into actionable insights. Enterprises can increase funnel conversion and identify their highest-value customers effortlessly.
Started in 2005 in a Sweden-based small town, Norrköping, Voyado offers a customer experience cloud platform that includes a customer loyalty management system. This platform helps businesses design and implement customer loyalty programs, track customer 
TapMango provides a comprehensive, customisable, flexible and feature-rich customer loyalty program. The loyalty tools include an integrated suite of customised consumer-facing technology, easy-to-use merchant tools, and automation algorithms, all aimed at enhancing customer experience. Adaptable to any industry, TapMango’s platform helps merchants compete with larger chains, converting customer one-time purchases into profitable spending habits.
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirements for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its innovative platform has played an essential role in managing different digital content or assets, to improve customer happiness or satisfaction. Some of its products include Adobe Gen Studio, Experience Manager Sites, Real-time CDP, and Marketo Engage.
