News Analysis
The Gist
- Total Experience is measurable. Forrester’s new Total Experience Score blends customer and brand perception into a single growth-aligned metric.
- Retention beats acquisition—still. Brands perform better with customers than prospects, highlighting the continued shift toward loyalty-focused strategies.
- Cross-functional alignment is essential. Customer success today depends on CX, marketing, and brand teams operating with shared metrics and unified goals.
Total Experience.
Sounds dreamy, no? It’s a heckuva romanticized notion if you’re a customer experience leader.
Forrester’s new Total Experience Score (TXS) debuted today at its CX Summit North America in Nashville this week.
It quantifies how well companies align brand promise with customer delivery—and the impact is real. Companies that nail both brand perception and CX execution can see revenue lifts of 2.9x (automotive), 3.7x (retail) and even 4.1x (investment firms).
Industries With the Greatest Revenue Lift From Strong Total Experience
Forrester found that combining strong brand perception and customer experience drives significantly higher revenue from retention and enrichment.
| Industry | Revenue Lift | Source Insight |
|---|---|---|
| Automotive | 2.9x | Brands that provide a great total experience see 2.9x revenue lift from retention and enrichment |
| Retail | 3.7x | Brands that provide a great total experience see 3.7x revenue lift from retention and enrichment |
| Investment Firms | 4.1x | Brands that provide a great total experience see 4.1x revenue lift from retention and enrichment |
What is the “total” in “total experience”? Forrester defines a Total Experience Score as the sum of all the interactions with your brand that shape consumer perception. It measures how a company acquires new customers, delivers this experience and drives loyalty with it.
Forrester found brands are better at providing customer experience for existing customers than potential ones. No surprise there. The move toward retention-based customer experience and marketing isn't new.
Not that all brands abandon dreams of customer acquisition, naturally (CMOs, we know you're listening). According to the CMSWire State of Digital Customer Experience 2025 report, customer experience practitioners report a strong focus on growing and retaining customers, as well as driving revenue. Nearly half (48%) of survey respondents said they wanted to “improve customer success/ retention metrics” while the same number wished to “Grow revenue and/or customer base."
Table of Contents
- Closing the Gap Between Promise and Delivery
- Bridging the Gap Between Perception and Experience
- Inside the Total Experience Score: Regional Standouts and Strategic Risks
- Is it Time to Make Customer Experience and Marketing One?
- Making CX a Strategic Partner, Not a Silo
- Why Unified Experience Insights Are the Key to Customer Trust
Closing the Gap Between Promise and Delivery
How should brands recalibrate their customer experience strategies when they land in the “churning” quadrant—strong with prospects, weak with customers? This seems like a dangerous but fixable place to be. What specific CX initiatives help brands prevent churn and convert initial interest into loyalty?
“A lot of the responsibility for the churn will often be on the shoulders of marketers who are making a promise that the company is not being able to live up to,” Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, told CMSWire. “But it’s not just the fault of marketing—it’s an overall misalignment in brand and business strategy that leads to this disconnect.”
CX and marketing need to be on the same page to ensure that what is being promised is being delivered, and what is being delivered is being promised, Chatterjee added. Sometimes, brands stretch to earn and convert new business, he said, and this is where CX and marketing together must determine how much stretch can be accommodated: in word and deed, before rupturing the customer relationship.
Related Article: Taste of Discontent: Leaders React to Forrester's Sour CX Report
Bridging the Gap Between Perception and Experience
What role should CX leaders play in closing the gap between customer and non-customer perceptions of their brand? The Forrester report notes that customer scores are often much higher than non-customer scores. How can CX leaders collaborate with brand and marketing teams to bridge this perception gap?
“There are several nuances here,” Chatterjee said. “First, you would expect customer scores to be higher because there is self-selection into the brand family. Separate from that, the goal is not just to narrow the gap but to make sure the scores are high as possible as well as close as possible. This happens when there is little to no daylight between a compelling brand promise and a brilliant customer experience that lives up to the promise, and that requires the relevant departments within a company to work as one, guided solely by creating value for the customer and the brand.”
Inside the Total Experience Score: Regional Standouts and Strategic Risks
Here’s what else Forrester uncovered in its Total Experience report:
- Total experience is a growth engine. Customer trust remains a strength—but non-customer perception is a growth hurdle. Across all geographies and industries, scores were higher among customers than non-customers. This signals a persistent challenge: while brands may satisfy existing customers, they often struggle to earn the trust of those not already bought in.
- CMSWire's take: Marketing, where are you?
- U.S. direct banks are crushing it. Insurers? Not so much. In North America, direct banks earned the highest average industry scores (61.8 in the U.S., 54.0 in Canada). Health insurers landed at the bottom—Cigna had the U.S.’s lowest score (47.9), and Loblaws brought up the rear in Canada (41.8).
- CMSWire's take: People like money. Make it easy for them to get it.
- European brands face a trust gap. The region showed the largest disparities between customer and non-customer scores—18 brands scored more than twice as high with customers as with noncustomers. It’s a red flag for acquisition struggles.
- CMSWire's take: Hey, European marketers: time to start targeting better.
- Asia Pacific shines in investment services. In India and Singapore, investment firms posted standout total experience results (64.7 and 59.8, respectively). ICICI Bank and HDFC Securities tied for the highest global score at 66.3.
- Growth grid insight. Many brands are at risk of plateauing or churning. Forrester’s growth grid identifies four types of brands:
- Leaders: high scores from both customers and noncustomers
- Plateauing: loved by customers, ignored by prospects
- Churning: attracting prospects but failing to retain them
- Lagging: failing both groups
Most brands aren’t in the “leader” quadrant—highlighting a major opportunity for strategic CX alignment.
Cross-Regional Trends in Total Experience Performance
Forrester’s findings reveal shared challenges and standout patterns across countries and industries when it comes to brand and customer experience alignment.
| Region | Top Performing Sectors | Key Challenges Noted |
|---|---|---|
| North America | Direct banks | Health and auto insurers struggle to meet experience expectations |
| Europe | UK investment firms | Large gaps between customer and noncustomer perceptions across many brands |
| Asia Pacific | Investment firms in India and Singapore | Australian insurers face weak noncustomer perceptions and CX delivery |
Chief Experience Officer: AI Frees up CX Pros to Focus on Action, Not Just Analysis
“Particularly in the past year, talk in CX circles has really shifted to driving measureable business outcomes,” said Trish Wethman, chief experience officer at Pontem Tech Partners. “The traditional role of CX Analyst, normalizing and pouring through data to find insights, is no longer needed. AI can enable customer experience professionals to focus on actioning and enabling stakeholders with insights.”
Wethman added that even change-resistant organizations are catching on to the productivity hacks that quickly automate analysis of the sentiment and trends.
“But,” she said, “knowing your target customer and being able to translate insights into meaningful decision making can unlock a consultative relationship with your product, design, marketing and operations teams that has previously been more one-directional.”
Related Article: The Inside-Out Blueprint for Customer Experience
Is it Time to Make Customer Experience and Marketing One?
Here’s the deal, though. It remains challenging for organizations to connect brand and customer experience strategies in a meaningful way. Is it organizational structure, metrics, leadership silos or something else?
“It's a little bit of all of these things,” Wethman said. “When it comes to org structure, too many companies, and leaders, are still viewing marketing and brand work as completely separate from customer experience. But your brand is likely to be the very first thing that a customer gets to know or engages with. Their awareness and perception of the brand create expectations and set the tone for their entire interaction. These teams need to be in lock step on research priorities and connecting the dots for customers in ways that will resonate.”
Wethman notes that when different departments focus on disconnected metrics, achieving alignment becomes nearly impossible. While a single, unified metric may not be realistic, teams must at least agree on the specific factors influencing customer satisfaction and pain points within their scope—and make decisions with those in mind. She adds that brand is often overlooked during tough times, but warns that neglecting brand performance can seriously undermine CX outcomes, given how closely the two are linked.
“Leadership silos, like org structure, are often driven more by ego than by intentional and thoughtful design,” Wethman said. “But thoughtful and intentional design of the org is what's needed to ensure that you are bringing your brand purpose to life in real ways for both employees and customers. The best leaders are looking beyond their silos, focusing on the customer and the experience they want to create and working backwards and brand strategy can play a critical role in that, serving as a north star for what the organization wants to achieve.”
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Aligning Teams and KPIs Around a Unified Customer Goal
Since the Forrester TX Score demands cross-functional alignment, how should leaders evolve their org charts, budgets or measurement systems to reflect this combined approach?
It starts with determining customer success measures, according to Chatterjee.
“Reworking KPIs and aligning them is critical to success,” he said. “Certain metrics like impressions and satisfaction may serve a limited purpose to measure departmental effectiveness, but there needs to be a more harmonized and unified system to minimize any disconnect between (brand experience) and CX. For example, orienting around a metric like Customer Lifetime Value ensures that every department like marketing and CX are aiming at the same goalpost.”
Related Article: What Is Customer Lifetime Value and How Is It Calculated?
Making CX a Strategic Partner, Not a Silo
How does getting more cross-functional alignment between marketing and customer experience look like in practice? And when they do, how can they work better together?
Some not-so-promising numbers out of the CMSWire State of DCX report: In total 39% of respondents told us that the IT function was the primary decision maker with “Customer Service/Support” (15%) and “Marketing/Customer Experience" (14%) the next most common answers.
It’s encouraging to see marketing/CX working together, but it’s looking like they need more influence, at least in that one tech arena.
“You cannot allow your CX team to sit off in a corner, separated from the business, their goals, their metrics and their people,” Wethman said. “The CX team must find a way to embed in those teams and to play a consultative role in ensuring that they have access to the information that they need to make data-backed decisions driven by customer understanding.”
In a previous organization, Wethman created a role called Insights Business Partner. These CX professionals were embedded within teams and functions to be the connective tissue between CX resources and the business decision makers.
“One of the best ways to ensure alignment with teams like marketing and service is to create quick wins for them through that partnership,” she said. “Testing campaigns, positioning and language or providing research that enables a deeper understanding of customer service preferences helps those teams meet their goals and shows how vital a CX partnership can be to the success of the customer, the brand and the business.”
Why Unified Experience Insights Are the Key to Customer Trust
Isabelle Zdatny, head of thought leadership at Qualtrics XM Institute, said 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.
"Since brand promises shape customer expectations, consistently delivering on those promises is critical to customer experience quality and consumer loyalty," Zdatny said. "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."
