CX News

America’s Best Customer Service 2026

Chewy, Navy Federal Credit Union, and Aldi lead the 750 companies named to USA TODAY’s America’s Best Customer Service 2026 list—an annual ranking spotlighting the brands that consistently go above and beyond for their customers across 45 industries.

Check out all the winners and see if your brand made the list here.

This year's methodology was the most extensive yet. Researchers evaluated 7,100 companies in depth, gathering insights from 32,000 consumers. The final rankings draw from 3.1 million customer reviews, combining new survey responses with data from previous years to highlight companies that have delivered sustained excellence.

Customer experience failures cost more than revenue

Frustrating customer experiences cost the global economy $1.6 trillion annually, but there are other impacts on your brand. Forbes lists the hidden costs of CX failures as:

  • Customer churn and eroded lifetime value
  • Increased acquisition costs
  • Winback costs
  • Reputational damage
  • Employee morale costs

As you’re building out and working on 2026 CX initiatives, analyze and quantify the impacts on those metrics when you’re getting buy-in and reporting on results.

If you don’t have the data or tools to get those answers, that’s your starting point for next year.

 

Baseball player turns to social to share bad travel experience

It’s a tale as old as social media - using your audience to get attention from a brand after a negative experience. Baseball Hall of Famer Chipper Jones took to X to share his bad experience with Delta after having his flight diverted due to heavy fog conditions:

A tweet from Chipper Jones to Delta describing frustration after driving home from Birmingham and spending over 6 hours in the airport, ending with criticism of Delta’s claim as America’s best customer service.

Brands may not be able to control weather and other unforeseen events, but what CX leaders can do is communicate when things go awry. Customers (and travelers especially) just want to be in the know so they can make arrangements as needed. 

Want to know what to do instead? Check out our blog on how travel brands can use AI to deliver great travel experiences. (The top one on the list is the opposite of what happened with Delta!)

Stitch Fix leans into personalization to drive growth

Stitch Fix is leaning into personalization to take market share and is leveraging AI to make that happen. It’s launched tools Stitch Fix Vision and Stylist Connect to reimagine the client experience, using AI to facilitate communication between clients and stylists. Its men’s business segment saw active client growth, helping to stem client losses.

It’s a creative way to use AI in the customer experience. As shoppers get comfortable and familiar with third party AI tools for shopping, bringing them into the experience with your own app or website is a clear step for many brands.

Make your AI rollout plan

A graphic from Kustomer shows most CX leaders, even among America’s best customer service teams, are still in Stage 1 of AI maturity: Foundational. The stages progress to Automated (2), Integrated (3), and AI-Driven (4), with an arrow from Stage 1 to 2.

Most organizations are still in the early stages of AI adoption - they are not ready to make the most use out of an AI solution.

That’s why we’ve put together this checklist breaking down what customer experience leaders need to consider along the AI implementation journey so you can launch successfully and maximize the power of AI.

Get to the further stages of AI before your competition. Grab the checklist here.

AI News

  1. Kustomer launches Data Explorer - Built on Kustomer’s AI reasoning engine, Data Explorer analyzes your data in real time, explains trends in plain language, surfaces anomalies automatically, and generates next-step recommendations backed by evidence. It’s grounded in your CRM data, your history, your queues, your workflows—so the insights are contextual, relevant, and actionable. And with our full visualization layer integrated, the charts and explanations appear together, making every insight easy to explore and understand.
  1. Retailers band together to maintain customer relationships as third-party AI grows - The all new Retail AI Council is bringing together retailers, technology providers and industry leaders to evolve what it calls the Shopper Context Protocol as more shoppers use third-party AI in their shopping journeys. The protocol would recognize loyalty, preference or intent. Founded by the COO of The Vitamin Shoppe, other members include Adidas, Tesla, Amazon and Apple. 
  1. OpenAI, Anthropic and Block join new Linux Foundation effort to standardize the AI agent era - Anthropic is donating its MCP (Model Context Protocol), Block is contributing its open-source agent framework; and OpenAI is bringing AGENTS.md to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which also includes AWS, Bloomberg, Cloudflare and Google. This shows the tech industry wants shared guardrails so AI agents can be trusted to work at scale.
  2. From Llamas to Avocados: Meta’s shifting AI strategy is causing internal confusion - Meta is feeling the pressure to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and insiders and industry experts report the organization has an unclear AI strategy even after spending billions to recruit AI talent. 
  3. Aplazo’s Playbook for AI-powered support - Aplazo has improved its first contact resolution rate, kept contact rates remarkably low, and empowered agents to focus on complex, high-value interactions. Discover how their team embraced AI as a partner—not a replacement—and how smart routing, automation, and continuous feedback loops are shaping a smoother, more satisfying customer experience.