Whether due to AIOs, LLMs, or social media distractions, one thing is clear: many brands are experiencing a decline in user engagement.

While there is no single solution or magic wand, what we do know is that, despite everything, many current online customer experiences are still far from stellar. 

The truth is, there is plenty of room for improvement and there is solid commercial rationale for investing in your CX.  Research shows that 79% of customers would switch to a competitor if they found out it provided a better CX.

I’m reminded of the old adage - you need to walk before you can run. Before you even start thinking about the future, innovation, AI disruption, or anything like that, you need to ensure you are meeting basic customer expectations. 

And you’d be surprised how often these are not met.

Go to the source and test your organisation's site and app as a user. Not as a marketer, not as a business leader, but as a customer. 

When a person visits your site, they typically have two basic goals: to get information and to complete an action. 

Therefore, when on your site, ask yourself:

• What is your as-is like? Are you making it easy for a user to get what they are looking for?
• Where and what are the problems? 
• How well are you doing against your competitors and industry benchmarks?

The second thing is to be very clear about your value proposition. In some larger organisations, and I find this more true in B2B, there is, for multiple reasons, a lack of consensus around the value proposition (VP), what the brand stands for, why you are better(different) than your competitors, and importantly, who someone should choose you over anyone else.

And this translates into a UX that will feel disjointed and underwhelming. 

Before you start addressing your CX, you need clarity on your VP. Unless it is clearly understood what you're doing for your customers, how can you expect users to engage with you?

And honestly, it can be hard - distilling everything down to a clear, concise message is not easy. However, once you have clarity, a strong VP communicating it clearly and simply will make it easier. You can’t sell what you don’t know you are selling!

If you think this might be one of the reasons for poor engagement, Harvard Business Review has some advice. 

In addition to unclear VPs, another major CX problem is the gap between what users expect from your brand and what you deliver.

Research plays a key role in discovering where these holes are, which is why we will conduct a thorough exploration at this stage for our clients. We talk to their customers to understand their expectations, then compare and validate those expectations against current industry experience and market standards. 

We can then provide clients with a clear view of where gaps exist, so we can address them before we focus on enhancing the experience. 

Once those changes are implemented, you can focus on both optimisation and innovation. 

That’s when you look at ways to:

• Make it feel smarter
• Give users an experience that is a delight 
• Use AI to elevate the experience  

We then answer these questions through experimentation and/or design sprints.

It would be remiss of me to talk about improving your CX and not mention that rather large elephant in the room. And while we are still in the early days of shopping with LLMs, I don’t doubt that this will also become a staple revenue channel for brands. 

As you prepare for this new sales channel, it’s important to remember that websites are here to stay. Websites are more than just a repository of content; they are where people will always go back to get that element of trustworthiness from the product, authenticity and brand experience. I don't think that's going to go away. For more on this, I highly recommend reading Do you still need a website in 2026? 

However, the key point here is customer engagement. Regardless of channel, device, or platform, brands still need to ensure that 1) their content structures and content can be distributed across all these platforms (including voice assistants) and 2) is delivered in a way that is easily understood by users and worthy of their time and attention.

My recommendations for creating consistent CXs across multiple devices and platforms without losing your mind are:

• Use modular content, 
• Implement an API-first infrastructure with clear brand rules for your product, so that when it is represented off your platform, elements of your brand remain, ensuring it's not generic. 
• When creating the content, you need to understand how each different platform will engage with it. What the rules are, what works for voice, what works for AI platforms, what works for web, and then structuring your content in such a way as opposed to having five different versions of it. 

My recommendations for creating content that is accessible and worthy of consumer time and attention are:

• Adhering to Universal Design principles across all of your content and complying with the European Accessibility Act 2025
• Following the principle: are you answering the questions your customers have when they visit your site? 
• Creating a site that prioritises its Information Architecture (IA) and thereby makes it easy to navigate
• Designing for mobile-first. For more on this, read 3 Mobile eCommerce experiences that get it right

And finally, because I get asked about this a lot, will we have a future with zero UI (user interface)?

My response, no. That’s not how I see it.

The way I like to think is that rather than no UI, there will be many, and they'll be multimodal. 

It will be:

• Voice 
• Gesture
• Touch - specifically mobiles 
• On a website, it will be around how you click on something  
• For AI agents and AI platforms, it will centre around the content and the focus will be on the user intent and understanding what that is. 

And importantly, the UI and mode will depend on the level of decision-making of your task. For example, if you're buying a car, you might use voice to browse the top-selling cars in Ireland and then request an email of that list. But I don't think people will want to complete the full journey via voice. You'll receive the list, then visit the relevant websites, and you may have further interaction before completing your task.

However, if you are buying groceries, it might all be completed via voice.

What is exciting for me and keeps me motivated after being in this business for so long is that despite all of the changes and new tech that has emerged over the years, we are still learning. And we are still adapting to human behaviour which is fascinating and surprising and often unpredictable. There is something so satisfying when we work with a client, and see engagement rise because we learned something about their customers, applied the insights and designed a new CX that hits home. 

*The images in this blog post have been created with AI.