Why Trust Is the Future of CX: A Human + Tech Security Strategy for Digital Leaders

From Risk Management to Value Creation

Trust, safety, and security can no longer be confined to the IT department. These capabilities must now span every team that shapes the customer experience, including product, engineering, marketing, sales, and support, as they play a critical role in shaping brand perception and driving business value.

Whether it’s onboarding, identity (ID) verification, fraud detection, or content moderation, every touchpoint, visible or behind the scenes, contributes to how customers perceive and trust a brand. The report findings confirm this, with leaders citing ID verification (73 percent), fraud detection (69 percent), and Know Your Customer (KYC) processes (64 percent) as top investment priorities for their companies in 2025.

Top Barriers to Trust and Safety in Digital CX and How Leaders are Solving Them

While the strategic importance of establishing and maintaining customer trust is widely recognized, putting it into practice at scale has its challenges. Insights from the report show that organizations are grappling with several obstacles, with the top three being the oftentimes prohibitively high costs to build, implement, monitor, and update trust, safety, and security solutions, regulatory complexity, and a lack of internal expertise. However, resourceful leaders are overcoming these hurdles in the following ways:

1) Investing strategically: starting small, scaling wisely 

Among the surveyed CX leaders, cost emerged as the most frequently cited barrier to implementing trust and safety initiatives, with 27 percent identifying it as their greatest obstacle. To address this, organizations are moving away from building end-to-end programs all at once, in favor of modular, phased approaches. Businesses can demonstrate quick wins, validate ROI, and build momentum by targeting high-impact areas first, such as ID verification or fraud prevention.

Over time, these focused investments can be expanded and integrated, enabling a comprehensive trust strategy that evolves alongside the organization’s needs. This staged method manages spending more effectively and ensures agility in responding to emerging threats and customer demands.

2) Embracing hybrid models that combine human expertise and AI 

GenAI and automation have become powerful enablers of scaling trust and safety operations, but human oversight remains essential. According to our report, the majority of enterprises (65 percent) still rely on humans, either entirely or as part of a hybrid approach, when managing risks across ID verification (79 percent), KYC (61 percent), fraud detection (66 percent), and content moderation (48 percent).

Even in areas where automation is very advanced, such as fraud detection, more than half of the respondents (56 percent) still said they maintain human-in-the-loop safeguards. These findings suggest that trust shouldn’t be fully delegated to AI, but requires a thoughtful balance alongside human judgment to mitigate bias, ensure accuracy, especially for edge cases, and keep pace with evolving regulations.

3) Partnering for speed, scale, and specialized insights

Building robust trust and safety capabilities from the ground up requires significant time, investment, and expertise. Our Safety in Numbers report reveals a clear gap between these demands and the resources organizations have, with leaders pointing to internal skill shortages, regulatory complexity, and integration hurdles as major barriers to progress.

Strategic partnerships with specialized providers can help close these gaps. Third-party experts bring turnkey tech stacks, access to expansive partner ecosystems, domain expertise in global privacy regulations, cross-border data policies, and a rapidly evolving landscape of AI governance and security standards. Many also provide built-in regulatory support as part of their tools and services, helping enterprises stay compliant with changing laws without adding pressure on internal teams.

Trust is no longer a byproduct of delivering reliable, dependable service. It’s a measurable, strategic differentiator and competitive advantage that must be proactively built into every customer touchpoint. In today’s high-risk and high-expectation environment, leading organizations are wisely investing in smarter and more scalable trust and safety models.

By combining AI with human oversight, forging partnerships with trusted providers, and focusing investments on business-critical areas, leaders will deepen customer loyalty, protect their brand reputation, and build foundational resilience to future-proof their operations. This will enable them to compete successfully in a trust-driven economy.