Making good hires is an important skill, but keeping those workers is just as vital. Employee turnover is set to rise in 2025 after two years of stability, according to public data analysis from Eagle Hill Consulting.

Women are more likely than men to quit, Eagle Hill predicts, as they report significantly greater year-over-year pessimism with compensation, culture, and organizational confidence. By generation, baby boomers are the most likely to leave (due to their “retirement cliff”) while millennials are the most likely to stay put.

Every case is unique, however, so it’s better to work on improving your company culture than fretting over demographics. Read our guide to “Employee Retention: What Does Your Turnover Rate Tell You?”

CX: 5 trends to up your game

Martha: A cozy, invincible brand

Chi-Chi’s: Tex-Mex chain is back

(Source: Shutterstock)

Customers are exercising more discretion, largely by directing their tightened cash reserves to products and services emphasizing quality and customer experience (CX). An incredible 86 percent of shoppers are willing to pay more for an exceptional CX.

Experts suggest leaning on these five tactics to increase consumer appeal, loyalty and repeat business:

AI with a human touch

While AI has many uses, a chatbot can’t do everything — and 75 percent of customers want more interactions with real human beings. So, don’t use automation to replace all customer service representatives; instead, use it to free reps up so they can solve customers’ unique and unforeseen problems.

Hyper-personalization

Almost half of customers will become repeat buyers for a more personalized experience. Leverage interaction data for more bespoke customer experiences — think Amazon’s personalized shopping recommendations, Starbucks’s real-time food recs, or Spotify’s algo-driven personal playlists.

Customer rewards programs

People love to earn when they shop, with over 81 percent of loyalty program owners reporting these programs are helpful during an economic downturn. 

Unified touchpoints

With CX spread across mobile, desktop and in-person interactions, customers want multichannel consistency. Make sure their interactions on one platform seamlessly carry over to another; nobody should have to remember different passwords for your website and your app.

Data-driven digital twins

It’s not quite as science fiction as it sounds. Digital Twins of Customers (DToC) will combine purchasing history, social media habits, customer service interactions, and more into a model that helps anticipate customer moves and preferences. We might not be living in a simulation ourselves, but — with 70 percent of large companies exploring the technology, according to McKinsey — our digital doubles soon could be.

As the place where transactions happen, your point-of-sale system is one of the most important touchpoints for your customers. You need a POS system that’s efficient and reliable so it can keep up with the pace of your business as it grows.

Lightspeed is true to its name, processing transactions quickly and easily with a consistent uptime you can rely upon. Run payments, track inventory, and share data across teams and channels instantly, making your business nimbler than ever. Want to take things a step further? Lightspeed offers personalized support to boost your sales process and improve customer experience even further. 

For an intuitive, effective POS system that can give your business a major boost, look no further than Lightspeed.

(Source: Netflix)

Before her days of throwing dinner parties with Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart’s reputation wasn’t all sunshine and one-pan pasta dishes. In 2004, she was convicted of obstructing justice in an insider trading probe, serving five months in prison. 

So, how did her multimillion-dollar brand come back more elegant than ever?

The recent Netflix doc Martha highlights how Stewart withstood the scandal: unwavering confidence in her way of being. Instead of retreating in shame, she kept an unrelenting focus on her media empire — spanning cookbooks, magazines and TV shows — until the court case just felt like a footnote. Stewart even now brushes it off as an “extremely boring” chapter of her life.

(Source: Hormel Foods)

Younger readers might not remember the world before Chipotle, but for middle-class families throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, Chi-Chi’s was the casual Mexican joint. With hundreds of locations nationwide, its fried ice cream and deep-fried burritos formed many core memories.

In 2003, however, a tragic hepatitis A outbreak at a Pennsylvania Chi-Chi’s affected more than 600 customers, four of them fatally. As the company racked up over $40 million in lawsuits, it had to close all of its restaurants, continuing only as a grocery-store brand.

Two decades later, the son of Chi-Chi’s founder decided enough time had passed for a relaunch, licensing the name back from Hormel Foods. Later this year, Chi-Chi’s will be a restaurant again.

It remains to be seen if Chi-Chi’s 2.0 can ride its nostalgic coattails to success. There’s far more competition today in fast casual and Mexican cuisine — but at least we’ll get some fried ice cream out of this deal.

Written by Dan Ketchum and Antonio Ferme.