The fundamental truth of customer loyalty is timeless: Enrich customers’ lives and you will reap the rewards. Bain has long been at the forefront of customer centricity, dedicating unmatched focus to understanding how companies that excel in this area create and capture disproportionate value. As we’ve recently shown, loyalty leaders have outpaced the stock market by more than threefold in cumulative total shareholder return.

However, while that core principle of loyalty endures, the ability to enrich lives has fundamentally evolved. Advances in technology—most notably the advent of generative and agentic AI—shifting customer expectations, and new engagement dynamics have rendered the old playbook insufficient. Companies must adapt or risk being left behind.

As the creators of the Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS®) and the Net Promoter System℠, we’ve revolutionized how organisations gather, analyze, and act on customer feedback. Our innovative tools, methodologies, and technology solutions are widely adopted across industries and have transformed how businesses engage with their customers. We can help you navigate the seismic shifts that are redefining customer experience (CX).

The new rules of engagement

You’ve digitalized. Now humanize. The era of simply digitizing customer interactions is over. Speed, ease, and reliability are table stakes: Customers expect these attributes, so they no longer count as differentiators. To stand out, businesses must humanize their interactions. Emotional resonance, not functional efficiency, is the new frontier. Success depends on forging digital and human connections that feel personal and meaningful, not transactional.

In the omnichannel world, conversational AI and ecosystem integrations must be empathetic and purposeful. This shift requires more than upgrades—it demands a transformation in how companies relate to their customers. Winners will stand apart not by outpacing but by outconnecting their competitors, with touchpoints that feel personal, human, and emotionally resonant.

Customers are in the driver’s seat. Generative AI has tipped the power balance. Customers now wield AI tools to navigate options, optimize outcomes, and shift loyalties effortlessly. Imagine an AI agent reallocating savings daily without manual intervention. The once-passive customer has become proactive, and companies once in control are now participants in a customer-led ecosystem.

This power shift is in full swing. Tech giants and platform aggregators are thriving because their scale fuels better user experiences. For others, scale often adds complexity, not delight. The challenge is clear: Adapt to this power shift, or fade into irrelevance. Customers today have an abundance of choices, and without differentiation, an ecosystem that extends your reach beyond typical channels, and a laser focus on genuine value creation, your business risks becoming a “once-great” brand.

Predict, personalize, and preempt. The days of waiting for feedback are over. Companies must anticipate needs before customers articulate them. And, more to the point, they must act on them. Predictive algorithms have been a game changer, but in many cases—ranging from outbound contacts to the creation of new, customized content—agentic AI can now execute actions based on those predictions. To make this happen, silos must fall, and predictive analytics must guide decisions. Businesses that cling to reactive models will find themselves chasing, not leading. The winners will be those who unify their efforts to deliver seamless, end-to-end customer journeys. Harking back to our earlier point about humanized customer interactions, businesses must also remember that people are multimodal, and that their emotional, cognitive, social, developmental, and cultural traits determine how they want to be treated by companies. Their preferences should feed your analytics engine.

Of course, acknowledging the new rules is much easier than embracing them. Organizational blind spots and senior executives’ fixation on “managing the business” often push customer issues far down the agenda. Our analysis of executive calendars is revealing: 90% of executives’ time is consumed by operational and talent management issues, leaving just 10% for customers, strategy, and growth.

The problem runs even deeper: There are far too many “degrees of separation” between executives and the customer. In many industries, those closest to the customer are buried within functional teams, their insights diluted or entirely lost as they ascend the organizational hierarchy. This structural detachment isn’t merely inefficient—it’s existential.

The blueprint for CX transformation

Step No. 1. Develop a bold customer value creation plan (VCP). The customer VCP is inspired by private equity’s focus on bridging strategy and execution to deliver measurable growth. While many companies already articulate their business plans around profit and loss (P&L) and balance sheet metrics, these are only starting points. The real opportunity lies in pivoting from traditional financial metrics to a model focused on creating value based on deep customer insights across the customer lifecycle:

• Attract: Win more customers through distinctive value propositions and smarter targeting.
• Serve: Deliver seamless, right-first-time, cost-effective experiences.
• Retain: Engage customers meaningfully at moments of genuine need to foster loyalty.
• Grow: Drive sustained growth by meeting more customer needs more often.

Companies should determine each customer’s future value and make critical trade-offs based on differences in their needs, preferences, and potential. To gain essential insights, companies can use a variety of research tools (ranging from surveys and interviews to direct observations of behaviors, as well as advanced analytical modeling and reinforcement learning); conduct segmentation and cohort analysis; track acquisition and retention metrics and analyze how relationships are expanded (e.g., multi-product holdings) and how wallets are deepened (e.g., frequency, value); and employ predictive behaviour analysis to anticipate future customer behaviors.

By linking these insights directly to financial performance and valuation, companies can improve decision making, make growth sustainable and measurable, boost valuation multiples, and cut through the idealism that sometimes clouds discussions of customer loyalty.

Step No. 2. Execute with a powerful transformation engine. Armed with the clarity of a customer VCP and prioritized growth roadmap, companies must act on their strategic choices to emerge on the winning side of the new engagement rules. Businesses must deliver on three key elements: