This article was originally published in Top-Tier Support, Front’s Head of Support Kenji Hayward’s LinkedIn newsletter for customer service leaders. For more frontline advice and actionable insights, subscribe today to get them delivered to your inbox every other week.
We, support leaders, are excellent spaghetti throwers.
Our careers are often a culmination of throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. Sometimes it’s well-calculated and other times it’s off the cuff — either way, keeping an eye on trends is important to gut-check if you’re on the right track and stay ahead of the game. Here’s what’s next in customer experience (CX).
Our team at Front has been talking to a lot of CX leaders lately, hoping to get a sense of key focus areas for the year ahead. They didn’t have to be a Front customer, we just wanted to get a pulse check on a wide array of industries and company sizes that were B2B or B2C. These are the trends we found:
Three buckets of support
Your customer base and product or service often dictate how you offer support. We found support fell into three buckets:
Strategic support: Consultative, technical, high-touch, high-CLTV, primarily digital channels
Transactional service: Non-technical, high-volume, low-CLTV, primarily digital channels
Transactional contact center: Non-technical, highest-volume, lowest CLTV, primarily voice
When thinking about structuring your team and picking the right tech stack, make sure you’re comparing against similar businesses to yours and benchmarking against the same operating models. I wouldn’t think of any of these options as “better” or “right” — some support orgs might even blend two to three. Which bucket(s) you identify with largely depends on your business model and what creates the best experience for your customers and team.
Some additional tips when building your team:
Get those quality assurance (QA) and knowledge managers in place
Build proper voice of customer (VOC) programs (not just random feedback)
Create real growth paths for your people
Value driver > cost center
Support leaders have long fought for their orgs to be seen as a value driver, but only in the last year has that really taken off.
The key difference in 2025 is that the customer experience has evolved from a "nice-to-have" into a strategic imperative, directly influencing purchasing decisions and long-term business success. There’s a paradigm shift happening with human agents handling more strategic initiatives and self-service support taking over the help desk function. In an increasingly customer-driven market, the companies that can quickly adapt to the changing scene and widen opportunities are the ones that will win.
Here’s where we’re seeing us turn a new leaf:
Support is finally getting more embedded with product and sales
Premium support is becoming a real revenue play
There will be greater emphasis on proactive support over reactive support
Support operations is the biggest growth opportunity in support careers
My tips on solidifying the connection between support and business value are:
Smart premium support packaging is worth the effort
Align support tiers to customer needs
Don’t sleep on pre-sales support opportunities
Tech stack reality check
All-in-one tooling is attractive, but often CX leaders still need to bridge gaps in their core help desk. Think of your support tech stack like building blocks — even if each block is beautifully made, they’re useless if they don’t fit together properly. Agents end up toggling between disconnected systems, manually copying data, and losing valuable context about customer interactions.
When evaluating new tools, prioritize how well they’ll play with your existing systems — smooth integrations mean your agents can focus on helping customers instead of fighting with technology.
The support tech ecosystem must-haves include:
Workforce Management (WFM) and quality assurance (QA)
AI and automation tools
Channel-specific integrations (CCaaS, WhatsApp, Slack)
My tips on tools:
Don’t get dazzled by features — sometimes integrations matter more
Think long-term about tool lock-in (switching is a pain!)
I could spend a whole newsletter talking about key long-term considerations before committing to a tool, so let me know if you’re interested in seeing that in a future Top-Tier Support edition.
AI has a ways to go, but don’t give up
When we surveyed our customers, they predicted the average support team member would save 15 hours per week using AI. Many believed the time saved could be spent solving hard support cases, building and improving knowledge content, and proactively reaching out to customers.
But in 2024 we realized AI rollout was more complicated than just a plug and play. Some businesses will ditch their AI programs, but you risk falling behind when your competitors power through.
Here’s what else we saw:
Support leaders are cautious about customer-facing AI
Testing AI internally is a smart move
Chat deflection rates are lower in B2B support (30-50%) versus B2C support (80-90%), tracking with B2C trending towards more transactional support
AI’s impact will spread to faster insights, where 80% of Front customers agree that CSAT will mostly be replaced by insights that AI surfaces from conversation data
My tips on AI strategy:
Start testing internally (help your agents first!)
Ruthlessly test your customer-facing AI
Invest in knowledge management to be a reliable source for your AI
Another note on internal AI use: Just telling your team to adopt AI won’t work. Using AI with my support operations team first builds trust and demonstrates ROI. I also gave access to the support managers, since getting team buy-in means you have to walk the walk. When I lead the charge, it shows it’s something I care about which helps break down the barrier to entry.
Metrics are at a turning point
We’re on the brink of some really cool things happening to support analytics as AI expands into surfacing insights. In a recent survey of over 100 Front admins, 80% agreed that CSAT and other customer sentiment surveys will mostly be replaced by insights that AI will provide from customer conversations. In the meantime, here’s what’s trending with service metrics:
CX leaders are evaluating a mix of speed and quality metrics to understand the full picture
Internal Quality Score (IQS) is becoming more important (Shameless plug that we’re building a completely automated QA feature in Front called Smart QA)
Not all CSATs are assigned fairly with a growing distinction between agent versus product-related reasons
My tips on measuring success:
Assess a variety of metrics evaluating speed, quality, and efficiency like first response time, customer effort score (CES), and AI Experience Impact Score (AXIS)
Build a solid QA program to track metrics like IQS
Numbers aren’t everything — balance your reporting with qualitative data too
So there you have it: Five CX insights to inform what kind of spaghetti to throw in 2025. If you’re curious to learn more about what’s on the horizon in CX, read the first part of our What’s Next in CX series by our customers.
More tools for your support team
Need a crash course on AI? Mercer Smith wrote an excellent guide on Augmented AI.
Big thanks to Adrian Swinscoe for having me on the Punk CX podcast! We had a great time talking about the value of getting everyone involved in support and why we made our support metrics public.
Get tips from our resident help center guardian, Karen Nguyen, on impactful knowledge management with limited resources.
Written by Kenji Hayward
Originally Published: 28 January 2025