Customer experience continues to wane – Forrester
7th July 2025 | Journal Of Sales Transformation
Ongoing challenges that drove last year’s decline in customer experience (CX) quality – weaker employee experience, waning customer obsession, disappointing tech implementations, and economic volatility – continue to impact how consumers perceive CX quality, according to Forrester’s global Customer Experience Index rankings for 2025 which were unveiled on 24 June. Moreover, the disparity between the customer experience that brands intend to deliver and what customers actually experience is widening.
“Customer experience continues to erode worldwide, reflecting a concerning multiyear downward trend and a shift in sentiment from positive to neutral,” Pete Jacques, principal analyst at Forrester, tells the Journal.
Key findings include:
- In the US, for the second year in a row, 25% of brands’ customer experience rankings declined in 2025, compared to only 7% that improved. Additionally, in most US 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, 7% of brands improved their customer experience scores this year while 2% declined and 90% 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% of brands’ customer experience scores fell and 58% remained unchanged.
