Dire Straits said it best in their epic song, “Telegraph Road”:

“I used to like to go to work, but they shut it down … We’re gonna have to reap from some seed that’s been sowed”

Customer experience (CX) leaders face a confluence of challenges, including high employee burnout and pressure to make generative AI magic amid persistent financial stress on customers and businesses. The cumulative impact of these factors has led to an unprecedented third consecutive year of global declines in CX quality. As a result, many CX leaders are losing influence (and their jobs) despite the passion that their bosses claim to hold for customers.

If you and your team are heading “down the Telegraph Road,” you can turn around by investing in long-neglected core CX competencies to help your company better determine what customers need, design and test solutions and potential experiences, and deliver these experiences while enabling frontline employees. As many firms enter financial planning cycles for the next 12 months, it is time to make strategic decisions on where to increase, decrease, or experiment with your budget for 2025. Our recommendations include the following:

  • Invest in cross-functional alignment to deliver connected experiences. Strong alignment leads to better outcomes: Organizations whose marketing, digital, and CX teams are highly aligned report 1.6x faster revenue growth than their peers and 1.4x better customer engagement. To help ensure functional alignment around customer journeys, invest in a shared journey atlas and prioritize key journeys — hire an outside partner to assist and train your team if necessary. Then, pinpoint how functional teams and business units intersect to support prioritized journeys by connecting and aligning roadmaps. Lastly, agree to a central budget with operations teams to fund break/fix activities and enlist lean Six Sigma resources to improve underlying processes.
  • Cut journey mapping without a purpose. A journey map isn’t a pretty picture; it’s a decision-making tool. But CX leaders often struggle to build momentum and drive action from their mapping efforts, in part because they don’t think ahead about purpose, goals, and potential broader impact. Cut funding to journey mapping initiatives that lack a clear objective, executive champion, customer insights, and the participation of key stakeholders. Use Forrester’s Customer Journey Mapping Canvas (client access required) to consider the factors that shape the effort before, during, and after mapping is complete.
  • Experiment with customer journey orchestration technology. Customer journey orchestration (CJO) is an established set of tools to improve journey discovery and accelerate journey improvements, yet only 19% of CX leaders say their teams use CJO tools. Try CJO tools if you’ve already defined key customer journeys and started connecting data sources, such as customer relationship management and customer feedback management tools. Start by learning about how the top CJO vendors stack up, then focus your pilot project on one of the core use cases of CJO: discovering journeys across steps, channels, and silos; analyzing past, present, and future behavior; predicting journey outcomes and measuring results; or adjusting interactions across channels in key moments.

For details about customer experience leaders’ budgets and priorities and a full list of our recommendations for increasing and decreasing investment, check out our Budget Planning Guide 2025: Customer Experience. Also consider attending our Budget Planning Guide webinar for CX leaders on September 17 for a deeper dive into our recommendations.

If you’re a Forrester client, you can schedule a guidance session with me, Katy, or one of our colleagues who contributed to this research.