Bots, brands, and the balance of CX: Thoughts from Forrester CX North America 2025

By MJ Johnson, AVP of Product Marketing, CallMiner

A close friend recently faced something no one ever wants to navigate: the sudden loss of a parent living overseas. In the middle of grief and logistics, they needed to book a last-minute international flight. The cost was staggering, and they didn’t want a refund, or a generic policy regurgitated by a chatbot. They needed an agent who could look at the total situation and say, “Let me see what I can do.” What they needed wasn’t efficiency, it was adjudication. Empathy. A human being who could interpret nuance and make a judgment call.

That moment was on my mind while attending Forrester’s CX North America event last month in Nashville. The annual conference once again brought together customer-obsessed leaders across industries to talk about the future of customer experience (CX). The stories I’ve heard and trends I’ve seen while attending the last three events continue to point to a rapidly evolving definition of “CX”.

Forrester used the event as an opportunity to launch and explore the implications of their Total Experience (TX) framework, emphasizing the need to align brand promise with actual CX. The premise of this framework highlights the gap between the promises a company makes through their branding efforts (the brand promise) and the reality that customers actually experience when they buy and use products and services from that same company. The more aligned those are, the less dissonance for the customer. As Kelsey Chickering noted in her keynote, customers often feel “let down, betrayed, or abandoned” when a brand overpromises and underdelivers.

The tension is real. On the one hand, customers are demanding better, faster, more seamless experiences, especially when interacting with companies that have historically failed to deliver. On the other hand, many of those same customers are still pressing “0” in frustration, just trying to get through to a real person. It's not that bots are bad. They’re getting smarter, faster, and in many cases, more helpful. But we’re not yet at a point where bots can manage everything.

The most compelling stories from the event acknowledged this nuance. One case study highlighted an effort to pilot an AI-driven approach to reduce QA costs and increase sales, but the success didn’t come from automation alone. It came from involving frontline managers early, using AI to surface insights, and focusing human attention on high-impact conversations. They used bots to handle the low-value stuff, freeing up people to do what people do best: connect, understand, empathize. It feels to me that’s the model we should aspire to. Automate where you can, human where you must.

Forrester’s repeated mantra was to stop chasing metrics and start changing behaviors. How many of us have received a communication from a well-intentioned CX agent, asking please, pretty please, would you consider providing positive feedback on the survey sent to you in response to your recent service visit? Forrester’s advice resonates in the current moment, where even well-intentioned CX teams can fall into the trap of treating automation as a silver bullet. The real opportunity is to rethink how we combine automation with human judgment. The future of CX isn’t about choosing between bots or people. It’s about supporting and maximizing investment and value in both. Supporting quality CX by deftly orchestrating delivery of both AI and human agents can help bridge the gap between customer expectation and business efficiency, particularly when done intelligently, responsibly, and with empathy.

That’s why I found myself reflecting on CallMiner’s recent acquisition of VOCALLS while listening with open ears. Bringing together conversation intelligence with AI-driven virtual agents isn’t just smart, it’s necessary. It gives businesses the insight to know when to automate, the context to know when not to, and the intelligence to improve that automation over time.

At the end of the day, CX isn’t about technology. It’s about trust. And trust is built when we get it right. When we meet customers where they are, help them through their most difficult moments, and remind them that behind the brand, there’s a human who still cares.