New king in fast food CX: Jersey Mike’s
CX Insights
Jersey Mike's dethrones Chick-fil-A — and the reason matters for CX
Jersey Mike's just knocked Chick-fil-A out of the top spot on the American Customer Satisfaction Index — a ranking Chick-fil-A has held for years. The sandwich chain scored an 84 out of 100, edging the chicken giant by just one point. ACSI credited the win to rapid unit growth, strong digital pickup usage, and a deliberately narrow menu built around franchise consistency.
That last part is the CX signal worth paying attention to. The full study covers quick-service, full-service, and food delivery. Across all three, customers are increasingly rewarding consistency and perceived value over novelty. With the restaurant industry struggling under price inflation and flat traffic, the ACSI noted that consumers are spending more selectively, not necessarily less.
Food delivery apps showed the clearest friction point: while ease of understanding fees improved year-over-year, fairness of pricing and service fees still scored near the bottom. When trust is under pressure, simplicity and reliability win.
Consumers are worried about a recession. How should brands respond?
Nearly two-thirds of consumers believe a recession is likely, per EY-Parthenon's Consumer Sentiment Survey, with financial confidence down 12% over six months and consumer prices up 4.2% year-over-year as of May. Roughly one-third are actively reassessing leisure, food, and travel spending. What should brands do? Two key strategic levers: reactivating lapsed customers (cheaper than new acquisition) and targeting consumers not yet locked into competitor relationships. Now is the time to audit your retention playbook and tighten your value messaging across every touchpoint. This is a key way to show how CX is a revenue generator, not a cost center.
Costco speeds up checkout up to 20% for a better experience
Costco is rolling out new cart pre-scanning technology, expanding mobile payment options, and accelerating same-day delivery capabilities. Costco CEO Ron Vachris says checkout times have improved up to 20% as a result of its technology investments. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed the pre-scanning in my local Costco, and I’m a fan.
Convenience remains one of the strongest competitive advantages in retail. The most successful customer experience initiatives often remove friction from routine interactions rather than introducing entirely new experiences. Checkout speed is a clear win - especially within Costco where the carts are huge and people lined up for checkout can impede shoppers accessing certain products on the closest aisles.
B2B CX requires a different foundation
Most CX platforms were built for volume — get the ticket in, get the ticket out. That works when your customer is one person. It doesn't work when your customer is a company with a VP of Engineering filing critical tickets at 11pm, a CFO calling when something affects the quarter, and an executive sponsor who only surfaces when the relationship is at risk.
Kustomer is making the account, not the contact or the ticket, the unit of work. The company is launching a purpose-built B2B platform that brings together full conversational history, native CRM context, and AI that understands account-level relationships. That means agents, CSMs, TAMs, and AEs all operating from the same shared workspace, each with a view organized around the outcomes they own.
The AI layer (Concierge, Envoy, and Architect) operates with full account context, including ARR, sentiment trends, open escalations, and contract tier, rather than just the content of the current ticket. A new Signals feature surfaces risk patterns at the company level before they escalate. A Company Timeline is coming soon.
For CX leaders managing renewals and expansion, the shift from ticket-level to account-level visibility is the difference between getting ahead of churn and getting surprised by it.
Our CEO breaks it down here.
AI Headlines
Global BPO Market to Nearly Double to $695.8B by 2033 — AI Is the Primary Driver. Grand View Research projects the outsourced customer service market will grow from $358.6B in 2026 to $695.8B by 2033, with AI-enabled customer support and omnichannel CX as the two core growth catalysts.
Anthropic disabled its Fable 5 and Mythos models after a U.S. Commerce Department directive raised national security concerns about potential misuse of the systems. The move effectively pulled some of the company's most advanced AI capabilities from public access. You can read Anthropic’s statement here.
U.S. and Europe Explore "Trusted Partner" AI Access Framework. Following the Anthropic export restrictions, U.S. and European officials are discussing a framework that would give certain allies preferential access to advanced AI models while restricting others. Access to frontier models may soon depend as much on international relationships and policy agreements as technical capability.
DeepSeek closes $7.4B funding round — with strings attached. The Chinese AI lab raised over 50 billion yuan at a $50B+ valuation, but the deal structure is designed to lock in founder control: investors park capital in a CEO-managed partnership rather than DeepSeek itself, with a five-year hold on shares. Tencent, CATL, and JD.com are among the backers. Major Chinese tech and industrial players are betting big on homegrown LLM infrastructure.
Respond.io Raises $62.5M to Scale AI-Powered Customer Conversations Globally. The Malaysian omnichannel AI conversation platform secured a Series B for North America and Europe expansion. The company uses a conversation-based pricing model — a signal that we’re shifting away from a pure per-seat licensing.
