We live in a hyper-connected world, yet many organizations are more disconnected than ever before. Despite an explosion of data and technology, companies today are struggling to build genuine, lasting relationships with their customers and employees. This disconnect is not just a missed opportunity – it’s a growing business liability. That’s why XM Institute is designating 2025 as “The Year of Connection.” Join us as we explore how organizations can create deeper, more meaningful connections that drive sustainable value through Experience Management (XM).”

Why Did We Choose Connection?

In 2022, we focused on “The Year of Agility,” highlighting how to tap into XM to sense and respond in a world full of uncertainty. In 2023, “The Year of Empathy,” we focused on human beings, emphasizing the need to improve how we collectively treat each other. Last year, “The Year of Trust,” we examined the importance of building and maintaining trust in an increasingly complex environment.

We believe that in 2025, organizations must be intentional about building connections.

Organizations today face a paradox: despite having more data, tools, and interaction opportunities than ever before, many struggle to create cohesive experiences that meet employee and customer needs and drive meaningful results for their business. Often this is because organizations focus on making periodic improvements to isolated touchpoints rather than considering how these interactions connect within people’s broader journeys. While this approach may drive incremental gains in the short term, in an environment of accelerating technological disruption, economic uncertainty, and rising stakeholder expectations, such disconnected activities will ultimately restrict the strategic and financial value of XM – leading to misaligned efforts, disjointed interactions, wasted resources, and surface-level fixes that don’t address underlying challenges.

The Power of Connection

While organizations can certainly generate value by optimizing individual elements of their XM program – like gathering better data or improving specific processes – the true transformative power of Experience Management only emerges when these elements are deliberately and systematically connected.

Consider a retailer that collects customer feedback about long checkout lines. The data alone might help surface the issue, but real change is more likely to come when the organization can connect that feedback with operational data (staffing levels, transaction times), employee feedback (process efficiencies, enablement), and customer behavioral data (foot traffic patterns) across the entire shopping journey. Such connections would enable store managers to proactively adjust staffing levels and coach their employees on how to create meaningful customer interactions during checkout without compromising on efficiency. By connecting data, processes, and people across the end-to-end journey, the retailer could make systematic improvements that optimize operations while strengthening human relationships.

When these elements are integrated consistently, each component’s value is amplified. As more connections are established – whether between data sources, across processes, or among teams – the entire system’s value grows exponentially, enabling deeper understanding, improved decision-making, increased agility, and enhanced collaboration. To help organizations create this kind of connected ecosystem, we recommend focusing on three critical dimensions of connection:

• Strategic Connections: Transform XM from a disconnected set of activities into a strategic driver by tying your efforts directly to the organization’s business and brand objectives.
• Operational Connections: Establish the technological and process infrastructure that enables the organization to systematically understand, deliver, and improve experiences at enterprise scale.
• Human Connections: Foster authentic connections between people to build lasting relationships and create the empathy, understanding, and collaboration needed to turn insights into meaningful change.

Strategic Connections

A successful XM Program must establish clear linkages between Experience Management and the organization’s core mission and business objectives. This means ensuring the XM program’s fundamental elements – from its charter and vision to its governance structure and roadmap – explicitly support and advance the organization’s strategic goals. When this connection is strong, leaders can clearly articulate how XM investments drive strategic priorities, resource allocation aligns with business objectives, and the program’s success metrics reflect meaningful organizational outcomes.

Here are some key strategic connections to focus on:

• Connect XM Program to Organizational Strategy. Align your XM program with your organization’s mission, brand promises, and key priorities to ensure XM activities purposefully advance core company goals.
• Connect XM Efforts to Business Outcomes. Demonstrate the value of XM by directly linking experience improvements to key business metrics like revenue growth and cost reduction.
• Connect Insights to Action. Translate XM insights into tangible business impact by establishing clear processes for prioritizing and implementing impactful actions.

Operational Connections

The ability to create seamless technical connections fundamentally determines an organization’s ability to scale and sustain its XM efforts. While individual tools and data sources provide value, true transformation occurs when organizations build an integrated technical foundation that allows them to systematically understand, measure, and improve experiences. When technical connections are strong, organizations move beyond isolated insights to a unified ecosystem where data flows efficiently, insights are systematically delivered to the right decision-makers, and actions can be automated at scale.

Here are some key operational connections to focus on:

• Connect Enterprise Systems and Applications. Build a scalable foundation for XM by creating integrated systems that enable seamless data flow and interoperability.
• Connect Data across Sources. Create a comprehensive view of experiences by unifying relevant experience, behavioral, and operational data across all touchpoints and channels.
• Connect Signals to Workflows. Integrate XM insights into operational workflows to trigger automated actions and deliver information to the right people at the right time.

Human Connections

While data and technology enable new capabilities, Experience Management is ultimately about people. Strong human connections – between employees and customers, across teams and departments, and among partners and stakeholders – create the collaboration, understanding, and empathy needed to turn insights into meaningful change. In an era of artificial intelligence and automation, these authentic human relationships become even more critical. AI can help identify patterns and automate processes, but it’s human connections that build trust, drive innovation, and enable organizations to respond to experiences with empathy and creativity. When human connections are strong, insights flow naturally across silos, employees feel empowered to act on feedback, and organizations maintain the human touch that distinguishes great experiences from merely efficient ones.

Here are some key human-to-human connections to focus on:

• Connect Employees to Customers. Employees and customers alike crave authentic connection, so facilitate meaningful human interactions that build empathy, create personalized experiences, and foster lasting relationships beyond digital touchpoints.
• Connect Teams across Functions. Break down organizational silos by promoting cross-functional collaboration and shared ownership of experience improvement.
• Connect People to Communities. Create lasting loyalty by building communities where people can share experiences, learn from and support each other, and feel a genuine sense of belonging.

Recommendations for Building Meaningful Connections

To help organizations strengthen these connections, we’ve identified several key principles:

• Start with the “why.” Before you jump into building connections, identify why a connection matters. Every connection – whether between systems, teams, or data sources – should drive clear value and support strategic objectives. For example, instead of connecting mobile app data with branch systems just because they can, a retail bank might instead start by defining a clear objective for this initiative, like, “providing branch staff context about customers’ digital struggles before in-person visits.”
• Map end-to-end journeys. Understand how individual interactions connect to and inform people’s broader experiences. Journey mapping can be a valuable exercise to not just contextualize isolated interactions, but identify critical connection points – whether between systems, teams, or channels – that have a significant effect on people’s perceptions and behaviors. For example, a healthcare provider might map their patient journey and discover that poor connections between scheduling and billing systems are causing patients to receive invoices before their insurance claims are processed, leading to confusion and frustration.
• Assess your current XM maturity. Which connections you prioritize will depend on where you are in your XM journey. Start by assessing your current CX or EX Competencies, along with your culture and current technological capabilities. For example, a manufacturing company that’s new to gathering employee feedback might realize that their program isn’t ready for complex analysis. So, they might first focus on combining basic HR data (like employee tenure and department) with operational data (like production output and safety records) to create a solid foundation for future, more in-depth analysis.
• Connect with natural allies. Start by building connections with teams and individuals who share similar goals, have complementary data, or already understand the value of XM. Focus first on partnerships that can create mutual value and demonstrate early wins. For example, a telecommunications company’s CX team might partner with their fraud department, who already tracks customer friction points, to build a stronger business case for experience improvements that would reduce both customer effort and fraud risk.
• Build for scale. Build connections that can both scale and adapt as your organization evolves. This means establishing clear data standards, defined workflows, and strong governance processes from the start. For example, an airline might start by connecting customer feedback to just one airport’s operations team. By first establishing clear data standards and workflows with this pilot, they could then rapidly expand to 50+ airports without rebuilding their infrastructure.
• Strengthen human relationships. Use technology to augment rather than replace human connections. Focus on how operational connections can enhance human capabilities and relationships, not just automate existing processes. For example, a software company might find their automated onboarding emails aren’t engaging new users, leading them to create a program connecting experienced users with newcomers for monthly mentoring calls to improve adoption.
• Cultivate hard and soft skills. Invest in helping people develop both the technical skills needed to create and maintain connections (data integration, system architecture, process design) and the interpersonal skills required to make them meaningful (empathy, collaboration, community building). For example, when implementing a new patient feedback system, a healthcare system might train nurses not just on the technical aspects but also on having difficult conversations about feedback, leading to more meaningful improvement discussions.
• Measure the value of connections. Track specific indicators of connection effectiveness – such as how widely connections are used, how reliably they function, and what value they produce. Assess both technical metrics (data flow, system integration, process automation) and human metrics (cross-team collaboration, community engagement, knowledge sharing). For example, a hotel chain might track not just how many departments access their guest feedback dashboard, but how often insights are shared in cross-functional meetings and whether decisions made in those meetings improve guest satisfaction.

Join Us in Making This the Year of Connection

We invite you to participate in this important initiative. Here are some ways you can get started:

• Share this perspective across your organization and discuss how building connections could enhance your XM program.
• Audit your current state of connection across the three dimensions: Strategic, Operational, and Human.
• Identify specific opportunities to strengthen connections within your organization’s XM initiatives.
• Engage with the XM community through our new Qualtrics community platform to share insights and learn from your peers.

Throughout 2025, the XM Institute will publish research, case studies, and practical guidance to help organizations build stronger connections. We’ll explore how leading organizations are integrating their XM initiatives, leveraging new technologies, and creating sustainable value through connected experiences.

The bottom line: Join us this year as we explore how organizations can unlock the full potential of their XM efforts by strengthening connections across strategy, operations, and human relationships.