A Forrester study has revealed that CX quality in the US and Canada is at an all-time low.
Indeed, consumer perceptions of the standard of CX being delivered across both countries slipped for a fourth consecutive year.
The findings are part of Forrester’s 2025 Customer Experience Index, which evaluates how a company’s customer experience impacts loyalty.
It assesses the “ease, effectiveness, and emotional components of customers’ interactions with a brand.”
For this year’s report, the research firm examined feedback from over 275,000 customers of 469 brands across 12 industries and 13 countries, with the findings highlighting the US’s continued CX struggles.
Indeed, a quarter of US brands in the evaluation experienced significant CX losses, while just seven percent improved.
Discussing why American companies failed to stop the CX rot in a blog post, Peter Jaques, Principal Analyst at Forrester, pointed to the “persistent gap between executives’ perception of the quality of their CX and how customers perceive their experiences.
This misalignment diminishes the focus that organizations need to maintain on delivering easy, effective, and emotionally positive experiences.
The disconnect has long plagued CX strategies, and its persistence suggests a deeper organizational issue.
Leaders are often over-reliant on internal metrics or curated feedback loops that paint an overly optimistic picture of the customer journey.
When these fail to reflect reality on the ground, teams miss critical friction points that define the real customer experience.
Away from the business-customer divide, Jaques believes other contributing factors include declining employee experience, waning customer-centricity, and underwhelming use of transformative technologies like AI.
The analyst also argued that some score declines can be attributed to this year’s unique challenges, such as customers finding it harder to see value amid economic uncertainty.
A CX Silver Lining
While Forrester’s 2025 Customer Index report made for tough reading for the US and Canada, there was good news for some regions.
Unfortunately, Asia Pacific was not one of them.
Across Australia, Singapore, and India, 37 percent of brands saw their CX quality scores fall, with just five percent seeing an improvement.
However, Europe did manage to deliver a CX silver lining as the only region to manage more score increases than decreases.
Although the continent still did not deliver huge improvements, its seven percent rise compared to just a two percent drop is still significantly better than the likes of the US and Asia Pacific.
Indeed, Matt Trickett, Experience Management Strategist at Qualtrics, warned European brands against becoming complacent.
“An unstable economic landscape means customer commitment to a set brand is more fickle than ever before,” he explained.
Customer loyalty still remains balanced on a precipice, as our recent research has found 66 percent of consumers are ready to walk if a brand breaks a promise, with half of UK consumers believing companies care less about keeping their promises than they used to.
In order to prevent this and build on the momentum of the CX Index, Trickett advocates for an “always-listening approach” so as to ensure that businesses are capturing and leveraging every aspect of the customer journey.
He said: “Building a picture of their frustration, happiness, upset, and all the emotions in between will help brands deliver a consistent CX that ensures promises are not broken, and greater trust and loyalty is built.”
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