Marketing & CX Leadership 2025: CMO Priorities, AI, Retention and KPIs

Marketing & CX Leadership: A Field Guide for Customer Support Leaders

There's a lot of noise about "marketing and CX leadership." Here's the signal for people running support teams. Use these trends to cut tickets, improve retention, and make your contact center a driver of revenue - not a cost sink.

AI in the Contact Center: From Hype to Help

Vendors keep shipping new "generative agents" for contact centers. Your job: turn them into measurable outcomes - lower handle time, higher containment, safer responses.

• Data first: Clean, current knowledge articles and macros. No AI fixes messy knowledge ops.
• Guardrails: Define red lines (refunds, PII, legal). Force human approval on risky intents.
• Pilot smart: Start with one queue and 5-10 high-volume intents. Track AHT, FCR, CSAT, and escalation rate.
• Human-in-the-loop: Agents approve/ edit draft replies for 2-4 weeks before any automation.
• Post-launch review: Weekly error analysis; update prompts, intent routing, and knowledge gaps.

If you need a simple framework for ethical and safe AI with humans involved, this guidebook helps: People + AI Guidebook.

Retention Beats Acquisition: Support Is the Multiplier

Money is tight. Winning is about keeping customers, not chasing new ones. Support owns the moments that decide churn or renewal.

• Core metrics: Customer Effort Score (CES), First Contact Resolution (FCR), Time to Resolution, Save rate, and Churn within 30/60/90 days of a critical ticket.
• Proactive saves: Flag risky events (billing fails, repeated bugs, onboarding delays). Reach out with a concrete fix and a timeline.
• Failure demand: Root out repeat contacts caused by unclear comms, broken flows, or poor handoffs.
• Expansion assists: Train agents to identify use cases that point to add-ons or higher tiers - without turning service into sales.

Want the research behind effort reduction? Start here: Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers (HBR).

Customer Advisory Boards → Support Advisory Circles

Marketing uses customer advisory boards. Support can run smaller, faster "Support Advisory Circles" with power users and high-value accounts. The goal: fix the right problems first.

• Who: Mix of advocates, neutrals, and critics; 6-10 customers per circle.
• Cadence: 60 minutes every 6-8 weeks with notes shared back to participants.
• Agenda: Top friction points, proposed fixes, experiment roadmap, and feedback on outcomes.
• Incentive: Early access, recognition, and a direct line to product leadership.

Contact Center 2025: What to Track

Whether you're on-prem, cloud, or hybrid CCaaS, measure what moves retention and cost-to-serve. Keep reporting simple, visible, and tied to action.

• Quality & speed: FCR, AHT, ASA, SLA, Abandonment
• Experience: CSAT, CES, Sentiment on escalations
• AI performance: Bot containment, intent accuracy, safe-response rate, deflection quality
• Business impact: Save rate, NRR influenced by support, Cost per contact
• Risk & compliance: PII handling, policy overrides, audit pass rate

Discipline Over Disruption: Cut Waste, Tighten Ops

Big bets are fine. Waste isn't. Run your team on short learning cycles and ruthless prioritization.

• 90-day roadmap: 3 outcomes, 3 metrics, 3 constraints to remove. Everything else is backlog.
• Weekly ops review: Queue health, SLA risks, top 5 drivers, and one experiment per team.
• Cost-to-serve mapping: Find the flows that drive repeat contacts, refunds, or manual escalations - fix those first.

Social Channels (Yes, Even TikTok): Service Over Noise

Social isn't just for marketing. Customers expect help wherever they talk. If your audience lives on TikTok or X, set crisp response rules.

• Routing: Triage by intent; public replies move to private channels fast.
• Playbooks: Pre-approved responses for outages, billing, abuse, and legal issues.
• Tools: Unified inbox, sentiment flags, escalation macros, and clear SLAs.

Experimentation Mindset: Small Tests, Real Wins

Borrow from growth teams. Treat every change as a test with a control. Ship in days, review in weeks.

• For AI: Offline eval sets, shadow mode, then limited production with rollback ready.
• For people/process: A/B test scripts, forms, and workflows. Keep what moves FCR and CES.

Why B2B Deals Stall - And How Support Unblocks Them

Sales slows down when buyers fear risk. Support removes that fear.

• Proof: Publish case studies on recovery times, security posture, and uptime during incidents.
• Standards: Share SLAs, support tiers, and response playbooks early in the cycle.
• Readiness: Fast-path security questionnaires and a public status page.

Your 30-Day Action Plan

• Day 1-7: Audit knowledge base and top 20 intents. Patch the top 10 broken articles.
• Day 8-14: Set a pilot for AI-assisted replies on one queue. Define guardrails and metrics.
• Day 15-21: Launch a weekly ops review. Start one save-play for high-risk customers.
• Day 22-30: Form your first Support Advisory Circle. Commit to one product fix per month from this group.

Skill Up Your Team

If you're building AI-savvy support workflows, structured learning helps. Explore role-focused options here: AI courses by job or scan the latest programs: Latest AI courses.

Keep it simple. Measure what matters. Fix the friction your customers feel this week - and your renewal math improves fast.