How to Improve Customer Sentiment in 2025: The Value of Customer Happiness

Variety might be the spice of life, but in the world of customer service, too much variety can burn your business. Consumers might want various ways to communicate and engage with customers – but they also want consistency – the same seamless, personalised, and convenient experiences.

It’s that commitment to delivering consistently excellent experiences that fosters positive customer sentiment – something that can make or break your company’s chances of success. According to the 2025 State of CX report from NICE, brands that excel in terms of customer sentiment outperform their peers by 43% in terms of stock returns over five years.

In simple terms, your approach to nurturing and retaining customer happiness isn’t just how you set yourself apart from your peers in 2025 – it’s how you boost your chances of sustainable growth.

The trouble is, it’s becoming harder than ever to keep customers happy. Expectations are evolving, and people are growing less forgiving of companies that make constant mistakes. So, how do you improve customer sentiment in 2025 – and take advantage of the “happiness” edge?

How to Improve Customer Sentiment in 2025

Cultivating customer happiness (and maintaining it) is far from easy. Global customer satisfaction rates are still only at around 76%, and loyalty levels are dropping fast. Fortunately, investing in the right technologies and processes can make all the difference. Here are tips for success.

1.      Rethink How you Measure Customer Sentiment

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. The first step to improving customer sentiment, is knowing how to track it. Today’s leading CCaaS platforms already come with various tools built-in to help with this process. AI-powered solutions can leverage machine learning and language models to identify sentiment based on a customer’s tone, language and other factors in real-time.

Some innovative technologies can both identify sentiment in real-time, providing instant insights to agents and tips on how to improve happiness levels. They can also review historical call recordings and transcriptions, for insights into trends, and what affects sentiment patterns.

To build on the insights you get from AI-powered tools, source direct feedback from customers. “Voice of the Customer” programs, which involve sending out surveys and collecting direct insights from buyers can help you learn more about what customers actually like and dislike about your approach to customer support.

You can even use AI tools to process these survey responses, and identify ideas for improvement. Already, Metrigy says that more than 43% of companies are using AI to better understand customer sentiment at scale. As AI tools become better at analysing structured and unstructured data, they can sift through huge volumes of chat logs, calls, reviews, and social media interactions, giving you a broader view of the overall feelings people have towards your brands.

2.      Invest in Agent Productivity

According to NICE’s State of CX Report, top-performing agents improve customer sentiment by an average of 38%, and reduce call times by around 11%. In other words, the better your agents perform, the more likely you are to excel at generating customer happiness, and boosting operational efficiency. So, how do you give your agents a productivity boost?

Start with analysis. Evaluate interactions that agents have with customers across channels to uncover patterns, trends, and opportunities for improvement. Establish a centralised strategy for quality assurance and management, so you can constantly find new ways to improve.

Then, start investing in cutting-edge technology to empower your teams, such as:

• Intelligent routing: Use intelligent routing tech to automatically match customers to agents with the right skills to address their specific needs and preferences.
• Agent assistance tools: AI-powered agent assistants can guide agents through conversations with next-best-action guidance and suggestions. They can also surface valuable information during discussions from knowledgebase systems and CRM software.
• WFO technology: Use workforce management and workforce optimization technologies to forecast staffing needs and adjust schedules, reducing the risk of agent burnout and ensuring you have the right team members on-hand at all times.

Additional tools, such as real-time dashboards that allow supervisors to track agent performance and jump into discussions using “whisper” or “barge-in” tools to provide additional assistance can also help minimise the risk of customer sentiment turning sour.

3.      Boost Customer Sentiment with Soft Skill Training

In an age where artificial intelligence is handling more customer interactions than ever before, customers expect distinctly “human” experiences when they eventually interact with an agent. If you want to boost customer sentiment, you need to ensure your agents have the soft skills they need to strengthen relationships with each caller or contact.

Stop worrying so much about training agents to close calls faster, and start doubling-down on training strategies that help them make the most of their human skills. Teach them how to communicate more empathetically, using active listening techniques and reassuring statements to connect with customers.

Provide agents with stress management strategies to help them maintain patience and professionalism when they’re dealing with more complex calls. Pay attention to how your agent’s soft skills influence customer happiness levels over time by tracking changing sentiment metrics with AI insights.

You can also use call recordings to create personalised training strategies for each employee, teaching them how to boost their soft skills based with role-playing exercises based on previous positive and negative interactions.

4.      Turbocharge Agent Efficiency with Automation

When you’re trying to improve customer sentiment, one of the worst things you can do is rely too heavily on AI and automation. Ultimately, building positive relationships with customers is about more than just delivering speed and convenience.

Your customer service strategy should always retain a human touch – but that doesn’t mean you should ignore AI and automation entirely. According to NICE’s study mentioned above, only around 35% of the time agents spend interacting with a customer positively influences customer happiness. The rest of the time is squandered on transfers, research, and other factors.

So, look for ways to cut down on the repetitive tasks that take your agent’s attention away from your customers. Giving every agent access to an AI assistant or copilot that can handle repetitive tasks on their behalf is a great first step. In fact, 79% of contact centre agents believe an AI assistant can supercharge their abilities.

Invest in copilots that can deal with things like transcribing, translating, and summarizing conversations, updating CRM systems, or surfacing information from various databases. That way, your agents can spend more time focusing on the human side of customer service.

5.      Go All-In on Omnichannel (and Self Service)

As mentioned above, while variability in the quality of customer service you offer can harm customer sentiment, you still need to give your customers options. Investing in cloud-based contact centre solutions that allow you to support customers seamlessly across all channels will ensure you can meet your audience on the channels that make the most sense for them.

Just make sure all of the channels you deliver support through are truly connected. It should be easy for context, information, and data to follow your customers from one channel to the next as they move through their journey with your brand.

Remember to prioritise the right channels for your omnichannel strategy too. Don’t just focus on email, phone calls, and live chat support. Experiment with SMS, social media-based service, and even video conferencing when it makes sense. Most importantly, make sure robust self-service options are part of the mix. This is particularly important as younger generations evolve.

Currently, around 38% of millennials and Gen Z customers say that they’d give up on trying to address an issue entirely if they couldn’t access the right self-service tools. Invest in comprehensive FAQs and knowledgebases, and look for gaps in them with the help of your AI tools. Double-down on high-quality chatbots and virtual assistants that leverage conversational and generative AI capabilities to deliver personalized experiences to each customer.

6.      Improve Customer Sentiment with Personalisation

Endless studies show that personalisation – when done right, can be crucial to improving customer loyalty, satisfaction, and of course – overall happiness. Today’s customers expect a personalised experience with every interaction on every channel – so make sure you can deliver.

According to McKinsey, 2025 will be the year of hyper-personalisation and proactivity, driven by enhanced data analytics and intelligent tools. It won’t be enough to just refer to your customers by name in anymore. You’ll need to actively learn about your customers, anticipate the kind of problems they might face and the goals they’ll want to achieve, and act fast.

Intelligent technology can help with this. With AI-powered analytical tools, you can align all the data collected from your contact centre interactions and CRM systems, to build comprehensive profiles for your customers, and use them to guide decisions. Using these insights, agents should be able to personalise interactions as they happen, using screen pops and AI copilots.

They’ll also be able to take a more proactive approach to serving customers, using the information you’ve gathered to identify customers to share relevant offers with, or determining which customers need to be informed of potential service updates and issues in advance.

7.      Don’t Underestimate Security and Privacy

If there’s one thing that can instantly damage customer sentiment towards your company – it’s an issue with security, privacy or compliance. As consumers demand more personalised and intuitive experiences from companies, they’re increasingly happy to share valuable, personal data with the brands they buy from – but they still want that data to be protected.

Trust is key to creating long-lasting and lucrative relationships with customers, and you can’t have trust if you’re not taking extra measures to protect your buyers. These days, adapting to strict privacy, security, and compliance strategies is tougher than ever, particularly as AI introduces new risks and potential threats that businesses need to be aware of.

You’ll need an end-to-end strategy for ensuring the data you collect is protected and stored correctly – and that you’re not making the mistake of sharing too much sensitive information with AI tools. Plus, you’ll have to take a proactive approach to monitoring conversations and interactions for emerging threats. Partnering with a reliable security vendor to help you implement the right safeguarding strategies will give you a crucial edge in 2025.

Transforming Customer Sentiment: The Key to Success in 2025

Ultimately, nothing matters more to your company’s chances of success than how customers actually feel about your brand. If customer sentiment starts to diminish, then your profits will dwindle, and you may find that you struggle to recoup the customers you lose.

The good news is that by investing in the right technology, training strategies, and a little help from some leading partners, you can turn customer happiness into your competitive edge. Here at Techgrants, we can help you find the vendors you need to optimise your strategy for customer service success – and ensure you can access the funding you need for a true transformation.

Contact our team today to learn more about how we can help you upgrade your approach to improving customer sentiment, or learn more about our incredible transformation grant funding options here.