CX Quality Continues to Slide, Forrester Details

Ongoing challenges that drove last year’s decline in customer experience (CX) quality continue to bring numbers down, Forrester Research reported in its latest Customer Experience (CX) Index, which it released today during its CX Summit in Nashville, Tenn.

In Forrester's 2025 report, the global landscape of customer experience (CX) has faced significant challenges, with 21 percent of brands seeing a decline in their CX scores. Only 6 percent of brands improved their standings, while a majority, 73 percent, remained unchanged.

Numbers in the United States were even worse. Twenty-five percent of U.S. brands witnessed a decline for two consecutive years, only 7 percent improved.

Furthermore, the disparity between the customer experience that companies intend to deliver and what customers actually experience is widening, according to the research firm.

"Customer experience continues to erode worldwide, reflecting a concerning multi-year downward trend and a shift in sentiment from positive to neutral," said Pete Jacques, a principal analyst at Forrester. "While the changes may seem subtle, they are significant and cannot be ignored. As customer loyalty declines, brands must focus on providing stronger customer experiences to reverse the trend. Even a minor improvement to a brand’s customer experience quality can reduce churn and increase share of wallet."

Among the factors contrinuting to these declines are the same challenges that drove last year's decline, including weaker employee experience, waning customer obsession, disappointing tech implementations, and economic volatility.

Globally, only 10 elite brands, which are in top 5 percent in their respective categories (Banca Mediolanum, Chewy, H-E-B, HSBC, ING, La Maison Simons, Navy Federal Credit Union, RBC Dominion Securities, USAA, and Zappos.com) maintained their status. This year, 14 new brands earned the elite spot on the CX Index, and only one of those (the U.S. National Park Service) had statistically significant score gains from 2024 to secure its place. One other elite brand (HSBC in Singapore) improved its score from 2024.

Other key findings from this year's global Customer Experience Index include the following:

• For the second year in a row, 25 percent of U.S. brands' customer experience rankings declined in 2025, compared to only 7 percent that improved. Additionally, in most U.S. industries, CX quality declined across all three dimensions: effectiveness, ease, and emotion. Amid ongoing economic volatility, customers continue to find it harder to justify the financial value they derive from their interactions with brands.
• In Europe, some brand improvements drove nearly half of industries higher. Across the region, 7 percent of brands improved their customer experience scores this year while 2 percent declined and 90 percent were statistically unchanged. At the industry level, some European countries saw modest gains in the banking sector.
• In Asia Pacific, widespread brand losses hindered progress across most industries. In Australia, Singapore, and India, 37 percent of brands' customer experience scores fell and 58 percent remained unchanged.

Isabelle Zdatny, head of thought leadership at Qualtrics XM Institute, says Forrester's findings must act as a wake up call for leaders focused on increasing market share, loyalty, and brand awareness.

"Forrester's Customer Experience Index serves as a critical call-to-action for organizations looking to strengthen loyalty and market share amid AI transformation and economic uncertainty. As consumer sentiment continues to decline, organizations face escalating risks,with poor customer experience already putting nearly $4 trillion in sales at risk annually. The companies that will succeed in this increasingly challenging environment are the ones able to translate a deep understanding of their customers' needs, behaviors, and motivations into exceptional experiences that drive lasting trust and loyalty," she said.

Forrester also today introduced its latest Brand Experience Index, which measures the interconnectedness between brand and customer experience, enabling companies to quantify their integrated impact.

Across all industries and countries, the average customer BX Index score consistently surpasses the noncustomer score, with differences ranging from five to 30 points. For example, in the U.S., Tesla earns a relatively high customer score, yet its noncustomer score ranks the lowest across all brands and categories, underscoring the significance of improving both brand and customer experience (CX).

Introduced earlier this year to help companies assess how likely consumers are to engage with them, Forrester's BX Index evaluates three key factors:

• Salience: How top of mind is the brand, and does the customer view it favorably?
• Fit: How well does the brand meet the needs of the customer and fit who they are?
• Trust: Does the customer feel confident that the relationship will spark a specific positive outcome?

"The new BX Index has been designed to offer brands a data-driven approach to win and serve customers," said Dipanjan Chatterjee, a Forrester vice president and principal analyst. "To fully understand a brand's perception, we calculated separate scores for both customers and noncustomers, which were then combined into a composite score to help companies recognize the duality between BX and CX. When companies align their brand promise with the experiences they deliver across both customer and noncustomer segments, there is a compound, multiplier effect."

In its inaugural year, Forrester evaluated 452 brands across 12 industries and 13 countries to quantify the strength of brands' perception.

Additionally, at its CX Summit North America, Forrester unveiled a new unified metric, the Total Experience Score, which combines the BX Index and Customer Experience Index (CX Index) to assess brands'ability to deliver on their promises.

"Since brand promises shape customer expectations, consistently delivering on those promises is critical to customer experience quality and consumer loyalty. Yet most organizations struggle to connect brand and customer experiences. Forrester's Total Experience Score proves that companies successfully unifying brand and customer experience insights are best placed to build authentic, trusted customer relationships that drive loyalty and sustained growth," Zdatny said.