Tactful AI has been officially featured in the 2025/26 KPMG UK Customer Experience Excellence (CEE) Report as a case study by the University of Cambridge, showcasing its successful collaboration with ELARABY Group.
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What is the KPMG Customer Experience Excellence Report?
Every year, KPMG conducts a large-scale study measuring how leading brands perform in customer experience across multiple industries.
The 2025/26 edition marks the 16th year of this global program, which collected feedback from over 13,000 UK consumers, generating 132,000+ evaluations across 441 organizations.
The report measures each company against the Six Pillars of Experience:
Integrity: Being transparent and trustworthy
Resolution: Turning problems into positive outcomes
Expectations: Meeting and exceeding customer expectations
Time & Effort: Making interactions fast and frictionless
Personalisation: Tailoring the experience to each individual
Empathy: Showing understanding and care for customers
Together, these pillars form the foundation of what KPMG calls “Customer Experience Excellence.”
What’s New in the 2025 Report?
This year’s theme is “The Shift to Agentic Customer Experience.”
That means AI is no longer just supporting teams — it’s starting to act on behalf of them, sensing context, making decisions, and improving experiences in real time.
Key takeaways from the report include:
Customer experience is rebounding in the UK — the overall CEE score rose by 1.7% after the post-pandemic dip.
Top performers: Richer Sounds, Nationwide, and First Direct took the top three positions.
Fastest improving sectors: Travel, hotels, and entertainment brands like Virgin Active (+15%), KLM (+13%), and Air France (+12%).
The most influential CX drivers:
Personalisation — 20.1%
Integrity — 18.4%
Time & Effort — 17.1%
These three together make up more than half of total customer experience impact.
Empathy saw the highest year-on-year improvement (+2.3%) but remains the lowest-rated pillar.
Ethical awareness is rising: 51% of consumers are willing to pay more for socially responsible companies.
AI adoption is growing, but the top customer concern remains “not being able to reach a human,” which dropped from 24% to 21%.
Why It’s a Big Deal to Be Featured
Being featured in the KPMG UK CEE Report, especially as part of a Cambridge University case study, is a strong global recognition of innovation and real-world impact.
The report is authored by Professor Mohamed Zaki from the University of Cambridge Service Alliance, a leading voice in customer experience transformation. His research highlights how Agentic AI — AI that acts with context, empathy, and purpose — will define the next era of customer engagement.
For Tactful, being featured in a Cambridge-backed report means:
Independent validation of the platform’s impact on CX transformation
Recognition among global leaders shaping the future of customer experience
Proof that the company’s technology delivers measurable business results
The Tactful AI x ELARABY Group Case Study
The case study spotlights ELARABY Group, one of the Middle East’s largest electronics manufacturers and retailers, and how they transformed their customer experience using Tactful AI’s unified CX platform.
Together, the teams achieved measurable results that were highlighted by Cambridge in the report:
Real Impact in Numbers
First Contact Resolution: improved from 53% → 92%, peaking at 97%
First Response Time: reduced by 22% (from 36.5 minutes to about 10 minutes)
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): increased by 22%, reaching around 80%
Digital Conversion Rate: grew by 15%
Operational Efficiency: saved around 3 full-time employees per month across more than 30,000 customer interactions
These results demonstrate how data-driven automation, when designed responsibly, can empower teams, speed up processes, and deliver better experiences at scale.
How Tactful AI Fits into the Future of Customer Experience
Tactful AI is a unified customer experience platform built for the AI era.
It connects all customer communication channels — social media, WhatsApp, email, chat, and more — into one workspace powered by automation, analytics, and AI.
The platform helps companies:
Understand customer intent in real time
Automate repetitive queries while maintaining empathy
Empower agents with insights, not replace them
Connect marketing, sales, and support data to one view
As the world moves toward Agentic CX, Tactful AI stands at the intersection of technology, empathy, and performance — showing that artificial intelligence can be smart, ethical, and truly human-centered.
