Personalization through content and data: PwC

Let’s stop pretending customer experience lives only inside marketing. It’s essential to your brand—how people discover your business, interact with you and ultimately decide if they’ll come back. Instead of being the sole owner, marketing should be the main orchestrator of CX, working across functions to combine customer data with branded content to strengthen loyalty.

PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey underscores why this orchestration matters. As AI-enabled personalization and customer engagement grow more important, many organizations still struggle to deliver consistently. To explore what distinguishes leaders from laggards, we looked at one key differentiator—tech enablement.

The impact of tech enablement comes into sharper focus when comparing organizations that leverage Adobe technologies with those that don’t. Our survey found that companies that are using Adobe solutions outperform in both technology maturity and CX outcomes. These companies tend to integrate marketing automation and data management more deeply and are ahead in how they track, personalize and measure customer engagement. In other words, they don’t just have more data but use it more intelligently to shape experiences that define their brands.

For CMOs, tech leaders and CX leaders, this shows what’s possible when technology and creativity converge. Customer experience isn’t just about marketing campaigns and the number of transactions. It’s intimately connected to building trust and measuring growth through smarter use of data, content and technology.

Evolving from instant clicks to lasting connections

Many brands used to obsess over performance marketing versus brand marketing, short-term traffic versus long-term identity. (Some still do.) As more companies embrace the experience supply chain—where every interaction reinforces the brand promise—those that use Adobe for marketing automation are employing more advanced metrics than those that don’t, survey data shows. Leveraging this type of data can be instrumental in turning fragmented interactions into connected experiences that strengthen loyalty and trust. As the survey data shows, organizations using Adobe tools are already advancing along this connected experience journey.

Adobe users track and invest in advanced CX metrics more often than non-users

Adobe users

Adobe non-users

Use customer journey mapping and analysis to measure the customer touchpoints that matter most

%

Are investing in omnichannel customer support to improve customer experience

%

Q: Which of the following are you using to track which touchpoints matter most in getting consumers to engage with your brand? (Select all that apply.)
Note: Showing 1 choice out of 10 options.

Q: Which of the following are you investing in to improve customer experience? (Select all that apply.)
Note: Showing 1 choice out of 10 options.
Base: Adobe users 86, Adobe non-users 320
Source: PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey

In addition, our survey found that Adobe users are ahead of non-users in tracking customer preferences and behaviors through loyalty management platforms (55% versus 40%), social media listening and analytics (55% versus 43%) and customer service management systems (48% versus 38%). These feed the create-to-activate spectrum, where data can better inform content from design to delivery to measurable outcomes that can increase business value. Brands that lead this spectrum don’t just sell. They connect, anticipate and evolve with their customers.

AI that can anticipate, safeguard, personalize—and accelerate customer growth

Chatbots have their place, but if that’s the extent of your AI use for CX, you’re probably in trouble. Even if some consumers are OK talking to a robot about billing issues or troubleshooting, we’ve found through our client experience that most want and expect anticipation, relevance and protection in their brand interactions.

Among survey respondents, Adobe users adopt AI for customer segmentation and targeting, fraud detection and sentiment analysis at higher rates than non-users. Meanwhile, chatbots and virtual assistants play a larger role in non-user AI strategies to enhance customer experience than Adobe users.

How Adobe users and non-users differ in their AI approach to CX

Q: Specifically, what has your company implemented in terms of AI to enhance the customer experience? (Select all that apply.)
Note: Showing 6 choices out of 12 options.

Base: Adobe users 86, Adobe non-users 320
Source: PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey

Sure, we all want to increase efficiency and reduce costs through AI. But strategic CMOs and tech leaders also know AI can be a growth engine if you go beyond the basics. Use AI to understand what customers might want before they tell you, to help safeguard them before they’re at risk and to personalize at a scale humans can’t match.

Move from basic digital signals to bottom-line results

Of course, your AI investments in customer experience are only as useful—and profitable—as your measurement of results. Are you confident in how well you track the conversion of a click, like or view to a transaction—and a lasting relationship after that?

In the quest to calculate true return on investment, both Adobe users and non-users rely most on the customer satisfaction score to measure loyalty. But compared to non-users, Adobe users lean more on financial metrics like customer acquisition cost and purchase value. Adobe users also are more likely to compare the effectiveness of AI versus human support than non-users (60% versus 51%).

Adobe users measure loyalty through financial impact, not just satisfaction

Adobe users

Adobe non-users

Customer satisfaction score

%

Cost of customer acquisition

%

Value of purchases

%

Q: How does your company measure customer loyalty? (Select all that apply.)
Note: Showing 3 choices out of 12 options.
Base: Adobe users 86, Adobe non-users 320
Source: PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey

This isn’t simply about adding more KPIs. It’s about choosing which metrics you can better connect directly to growth, efficiency and customer lifetime value. Making creative bets is great, but success hinges on making insights actionable and reliably measuring the business impact of those bets.

5 next steps for marketing and technology leaders

The writing is on the wall. Or should we say the algorithm has spoken? Companies that will thrive going forward should commit to treating customer experience as their brand, fuse content with data, push AI beyond the obvious and reimagine loyalty as advocacy. Here are five actions to start.

Make customer experience the centerpiece of your brand strategy. Invest in tools like journey mapping and omnichannel support so every touchpoint delivers for your customers.

Sharpening customer insights doesn’t matter if execution lags. Find and break any bottlenecks in your marketing content supply chain that threaten your ability to fuel fast, personalized journeys at scale.

Stop treating AI like a customer service upgrade. Use it for segmentation, fraud detection and sentiment analysis to accelerate growth.

Design loyalty strategies around advocacy and trust, powered by first-party data. True loyalty comes from being remembered—what they liked or skipped.

You don’t have to drop existing metrics, but consider how you can better track and analyze purchase frequency, acquisition cost, value per customer and AI-human effectiveness.