15 Predictions That Will Redefine Customer Experience in 2026

Discover the customer experience trends that brands need to know about to deliver more business value in the new year.

For years, customer experience (CX) teams have taken the temperature: checking scores, tracking sentiment, reporting trends.

But 2026 is the year CX grows up. Listening isn’t enough. Reporting isn’t enough.

The organizations that win will be the ones that treat customer experience like the central nervous system of the business. A system that senses what is happening, diagnoses issues, triggers action with speed and precision, and proves value that leadership cannot ignore.

These are the trends that will separate the reactive from the resilient. 

Here is what Medallia experts say will define the leaders in 2026.

2026 CX Trends: 15 Predictions for the New Year

Agentic, generative, and predictive AI will transform customer interactions.

1. Agentic AI will resolve issues, complete transactions, and change the balance of power

Agentic AI is moving from concept to everyday reality.

Customers will use personal AI agents to negotiate prices, rebook travel, manage returns, and make purchases without ever speaking to a human or navigating a website.

“Agentic commerce is going to really take root next year. We’re going to see some meaningful revenue coming from agentic commerce. That’s my bold prediction for 2026,” says Mike Debnar, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Retail at Medallia, who previously led customer experience and digital innovation at 7-Eleven. 

“What’s going to happen is we’ll go from countless service loops and conversations to real instant resolution,” adds Geoffrey Ryskamp, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Hospitality at Medallia, who has held management and operational roles with Hilton Worldwide, Marriott International, and more. 

2. The new customer journey will not begin on your website

With generative platforms producing answers, recommendations, and even purchases, customers are making decisions before they ever reach your website. Brands will need to engage where discovery and action now take place.

“In 2026, I expect brands to lose upwards of 40% of all of their customers coming to their websites,” says Michael Mallett, VP, Digital Center of Excellence at Medallia, the pioneering founder and transformational leader of Medallia’s Digital Experience practice with 15 years of experience in CX.

After all, 60% of user searches now end without the consumer clicking through to visit a company’s website, thanks to generative AI overviews. This type of zero-click customer journey is likely to increase as consumers are able to complete transactions directly within GenAI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, he adds.

3. AI will evolve from a feature to the engine powering CX

AI-powered CX solutions will dominate how brands drive better outcomes across sales, marketing, retention, and operational efficiencies. 

“In 2026, we’re going to really see a shift in the way that people collect, analyze, and act on customer experience data using generative AI,” says Sid Banerjee, Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia, the former founder, CEO, Chairman, and Chief Strategy Officer of Clarabridge, who has held leadership roles at Ernst & Young and Sprint. 

GenAI-powered CX systems will help brands find, synthesize, and analyze data better and faster, and empower organizations to deliver the best action in response to both negative and positive customer experiences. 

“Not only that, we’re going to see generative AI being used to turbocharge and create agentic systems that will actually automate a marketing campaign or personalize a digital experience or even take action when a customer is trying to do something with a company,” he adds. 

As part of this latest big wave in AI, which will begin to unfold next year but may take longer than 2026 to fully play out, platforms like Medallia will be able to create agentic interactions with other systems in brands’ tech stacks so companies can leverage CX to influence all aspects of the business.

4. AI will accelerate creativity and innovation

“Build your program with the right platform and tools that allow you to create a foundation of stability, but also open the door to curiosity and innovation,” says Courtney Shealy, SVP Strategic Presales at Medallia, whose over 10 years of experience in CX includes leadership roles at Clarabridge. 

5. Reactive feedback is over, and true responsiveness begins

Survey-only approaches will not keep up.

Consumers expect every interaction to feel personalized, coordinated, and responsive, says Amber Maraccini, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Healthcare at Medallia, who has held experience leadership roles at Renown Health and worked as a clinical assistant professor at the University of Nevada. 

“AI won’t just summarize feedback, it will be used to fuse digital, contact center, and care signals into a single adaptive nervous system that can truly sense and respond to human needs instantly,” she adds.

6. Warning: The “AI tax” is coming

Inevitably, as more customer experiences shift to being driven by AI, some consumers may be less forgiving of errors caused by AI versus if the same type of issue were the result of human error, which could lead to an “AI tax,” or cause negative KPIs like churn, detractors, customer complaints, negative brand sentiment, and negative reviews to spike. 

“If I could give one piece of advice to CX leaders for 2026, it would be to start getting ready for the coming AI tax,” says Andrew Custage, Sr. Director, Head of Research Insights at Medallia, who has advised some of the biggest brands across retail, restaurants, and other industries.

“As practitioners look at their ratings and reviews and trends in their metrics, they should be well-aware of how AI is playing a role in changes,” he adds.

7. AI without responsibility will fail

“The leaders that will stand out are those that will be able to bridge and apply cutting-edge technologies with human empathy, operationalizing AI responsibility while keeping customer trust at the core,” says Rami Haffar, Partner at Medallia’s partner New Metrics.

Surveys-only CX is out; Omnichannel CX is in.

8. Real-time insights will become a competitive advantage

Most CX practitioners recognize that surveys alone aren’t enough to understand their customers. Next year’s innovators are going to get ahead of the pack by using a “wider arsenal of tools to get insights for customer experience,” says Custage.

“In 2026, the leading organizations are going to be the ones that move much further to combine survey insights with those from conversational data, customer service interactions, digital experience analytics, market research, employee feedback, social listening, and many other tools,” he adds.

9. Silent signals will become the most powerful signals

“Stop treating the survey as the primary source of truth,” says Ryskamp.

Why? Because by the time they’ve been filled out, it’s already too late. 

Think: Digital frustration scores, operational delay data, and insights from back and forth customer messaging and call center transcripts. This is the type of information that can reveal the real, underlying cause of customer complaints. 

Brands that stop chasing scores and start fixing friction will rise to the top.

10. Employees become the most underrated and valuable source of insight

Employees have all the context.

We know customer feedback survey rates are declining. In 2026, one of the best antidotes will be right at brands’ fingertips—tapping their own employees’ insights into what’s happening for customers, says Melissa Arronte, PhD, VP, Executive Advisor for Employee Experience at Medallia, who previously served as a leader in HR and analytics at Liberty Mutual Insurance and Citizens Bank. 

“They’re able to tell us about the issues our customers are experiencing, they can tell us what obstacles they face in their ability to serve our customers, and they’re able to suggest solutions,” she explains. 

11. Real-time access to insights will reach the frontlines

Frontline employees need more than reports. They need information that powers action in the moment, says Jodi Searl, JD, PhD, Chief Client Experience Officer at Medallia, who was previously the Head of Global Dealer Training for the Harley-Davidson Motor Company, where she led the strategic transformation and operationalization of customer experience for the global dealer network.

In 2026, she expects leaders will empower their frontline employees who are able to “influence and take action in the moment,” giving them the right data “to engage in immediate, predictive, and proactive service recovery.”

CX will evolve into a horizontal function that operates across the business.

12. The new way to achieve success? Teaming up across the C-suite

Companies that want to mature their customer experience management programs will need to form partnerships across the organization, understand other teams’ shared goals, and articulate how CX can help these business partners achieve their goals, says Bloch.

Banerjee and Jennifer Buchanan, Managing Director at Medallia’s partner Deloitte Digital, agree. 

“If I could give one piece of advice to CX leaders heading into 2026, it would be, ‘Don’t think of yourself as just a CX leader,’” says Banerjee. “‘Think of yourself as a business executive, helping to drive collaboration and transformation across sales, across marketing, across support.’”

The new imperative for CX leaders? To work with teams across the organization to help them understand not just how to respond to customer feedback, but also how to use these insights to update processes, systems, and tools to “change customer experience for the better,” he explains.

“CX leaders in 2026 will be the great connectors, bringing the customer and the business closer together than ever before,” adds Buchanan.

Rather than simply producing reports that go unused, real CX leaders will fully integrate their teams into the ways the business operates, she explains.

13. CX and marketing will move in lockstep

Traditional marketing tactics and metrics will evolve to incorporate CX insights and metrics. Marketers will no longer be able to rely on messaging and positioning alone. They’ll need to own not just how brands show up, but how customers feel across every brand interaction.

“CX-anchored measures will become the new indicators of brand health, loyalty, and long-term growth,” says Carrie Parker, Chief Marketing Officer at Medallia, who has over 25 years of experience leading high-performing teams, transforming brands, and driving revenue growth for global leaders like Cision, American Express, and Kantar. 

“Teams that blend structured and unstructured signals, from feedback to real customer behavior, will uncover insights that power smarter, faster, more resonant strategies,” she adds.

Delivering quantified business value will be the #1 KPI for CX teams. 

14. Connecting CX to financial outcomes will become the new measure of success

“We’ve been talking about the importance of business value-add and and making sure that what we do as CX leaders contributes to the bottom line for some time, but in 2026, talking about it will no longer be enough,” says Judy Bloch, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Financial Services at Medallia, who has held customer experience leadership roles at Sprint, Citi, and UMB. “It’s no longer nice-to-have. It’s become a real critical, must-have, non-negotiable for any successful CX leader.”

That’s a sentiment Dave Klimek, Partner at Medallia’s partner KPMG, and Searl also echo. 

“My advice for CX leaders in 2026: Make every insight actionable, relevant, and financially grounded,” he adds.

CX professionals shouldn’t simply report on what customers are saying, but elaborate on what changes need to be made to unlock greater value for the business, he explains. “That’s how CX becomes part of the operation, not just a report.”

In 2026, Searl expects a big shift in the evolution of experience management, as CX priorities move from focusing on signal capture and service recovery to measuring the impact of experience management on overall business performance.

15. Listening is not enough. Action is what proves value.

For too long, CX teams have focused on customer listening. But without action, where’s the impact? Next year, CX teams will have to prove their value—and the tool you’ll need is structured problem solving, says Bloch.

It’s a simple, yet transformative process: Name the problem. Define your why—why you’re doing customer experience management and what impact it will have on the business. Build the business case. Implement a change and measure the impact. 

CX’s New Non-Negotiable

Too many organizations are still treating CX like a thermometer. Score watching. Pulse taking. Guessing. Hoping.

There is a smarter approach.

Customer experience has become the central nervous system of the business. A living intelligence that senses, diagnoses, and acts. A system that does not simply observe the temperature but understands the cause and triggers the right response.

Our experts predict a wave of change for customer experience in 2026. If you are ready to lead it, the Modern CX playbook is your step-by-step guide to making this shift for real.