CX analyst/advisor and organizational psychologist helping firms succeed with the human elements of business
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Articles by Pete Jacques
Forrester’s Global Net Promoter Score Rankings Reveal A Turn In Customer Loyalty
If you’ve ever felt late-summer sadness, you’re not alone. Perhaps it’s because days are getting shorter or you feel the impending sense of a return to dull routines. Mental health experts recommend getting outside as much as possible to boost Vitamin D intake and squeezing in that last beach read before Labor Day. You might also take solace in new Forrester research that shows consumer loyalty sentiments have rebounded a bit.
Emotion Leads CX Quality Rebound In The US
After four years of decline, customer experience (CX) in the United States has finally ticked back upward. New findings from Forrester’s 2026 Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) reveal a modest but important improvement in overall CX quality, marking the first year-over-year increase since 2021. At the same time, the data shows that organizations still have major ground to regain before returning to pre-decline performance levels.
Have We Turned The Corner On CX Quality?
Forrester’s 2026 Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) reveals a market defined more by uneven momentum and less by broad progress. While North America shows early signs of recovery following the last few years of decline, Europe and Asia Pacific largely remain in a holding pattern. This year’s just-released results show that CX in the US and Canada improved significantly for most industries and for far more brands than in 2025.
Make CX A Business Mandate in Financial Services
Many CX leaders struggle to get executive buy-in. A conversation about customer loyalty or a dashboard highlighting month-over-month channel performance just doesn’t have the sway. That’s because customer experience (CX) is not just about survey results or incremental improvements to channels or touchpoints—it is a primary lever for growth, trust, and long‑term competitiveness.
Forrester’s Global Net Promoter Score Rankings, 2025
About 31% of American adults plan on setting a New Year’s resolution, according to a recent YouGov poll. As expected, most involve self-improvement — top picks include exercising more, being happier, and eating better. If your 2026 resolutions include refining your customer experience (CX) improvement plan, the recent release of Forrester’s Global Net Promoter Score Rankings, 2025, can help.
Customer Loyalty Insights From Forrester
Blog On the anniversary of Brian Niccol taking the reins, we look at the foundation he has laid for the future. Blog Learn the right questions to ask and the right tactics to employ to improve customer survey response rates. Blog How can you make your customer advocacy program more proactive, more transparent, and more motivating to customers? With technology. Higher-performing customer advocacy programs lean on technology to scale customer advocate sourcing, management, activation, and measurement.
voice of the customer (VOC) Archives
How To Simplify CX Tech Buying Decisions With Function-First Thinking Low Survey Response Rates: Are You Asking The Wrong Question? How To Reconcile Your Key CX Metrics: rNPS vs.
B2B Research - Forrester
Podcast In this episode of What It Means, we dig into fear as a motivator in the B2B buying process, the human-centric future of digital experiences, and what CISOs need to know coming out of Cisco Live. Blog While most B2B organizations have an established process for evaluating traditional data providers, many have less practice in the evaluation of second- and third-party intent sources.
B2B CX - Forrester
Why B2B Customer Service Is Now Part Of My Research Agenda Parting Lessons From CX Summit North America To Help You Deliver The Total Experience Ask Again Later? No Thanks — The Future Of Customer Success Is Now Low Survey Response Rates: Are You Asking The Wrong Question?
Customer Experience Quality In The US Falls To (Another) All-Time Low
Like the proverbial frog that doesn’t feel the water becoming increasingly hotter, many North American brands are inching into more treacherous positions with their customers’ loyalty as measured by Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) rankings. This year’s just-released results show that US and Canada consumer perceptions of CX quality have dropped for a fourth consecutive year and now sit at a new all-time low.
Low Survey Response Rates: Are You Asking the Wrong Question?
I recently binged Season 4 of the HBO series “True Detective.” In it, Jody Foster plays Detective Liz Danvers who investigates the disappearance of eight men from an Alaskan research facility. Over the course of the investigation, she mentors a junior officer as they work through the evidence.
Customer Experience Maturity - Forrester
Blog AIA Group has won Forrester’s 2025 APAC Customer Obsession Award, recognized for putting customers at the heart of its strategy, operations, and leadership. The company stood out among strong contenders across the region. Blog Advanced technologies and analytic methods are redefining how organizations measure experiences and extract insights. CX leaders have an opportunity — and a responsibility — to spearhead this transformation.
Customer Experience Measurement Archives
Blog Budget planning this season may feel like a high-stakes expedition into uncharted territory. Learn how our 2026 Budget Planning Guide can help customer experience leaders deftly navigate this uncertain terrain. Blog As another CX Summit North America draws to a close, it’s time to get to work. Use these takeaways to help you create your action plan for transforming the experiences you offer. Blog While persistent challenges plague CX in North America, EMEA offered some bright spots.
Loyalty - Forrester
Brand Manufacturers: Explore Dynamic Commerce Before Retailers Eat Your Lunch! Starbucks: One Year Later Low Survey Response Rates: Are You Asking The Wrong Question? Tariffs, Your Customer, And Your Brand: A Common-Sense Guide Consumers Crave More Than Discounts From Loyalty Programs Is Your Bank Ready For What’s Next In Mobile?
School’s In Session: Five Lessons Learned from The Forrester Wave™: Customer Experience Strategy Consulting Services, Q4 2024
It’s Autumn here in the US, and school is very much in session. Like my kids, learning has been tops on the agenda for the past several months, as I heard briefings from and interviewed clients of the top CX strategy consulting firms in the world. As with the evaluation in 2022, the field was narrowed to vendors with a breadth of CX strategy-related competencies, a large global footprint, and a high amount of revenue earned from developing CX strategies.
Leverage Collaborative Supply Networks To Achieve Supply Chain Resilience And Sustainability
Do you recall all the supply chain drama of the Covid shut downs from March 2020 to December 2021? Do you remember the feverish discussions about a ‘New Normal’? CPG led the way with enterprise-wide Sales & Operations Planning. Some CPGs were familiar with wildly fluctuating demand and periodic supply bottlenecks. They had invested in Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) to align their sales channels, marketing, and financial planning smoothing the load on production and transportation capacity.
How to Reconcile Your Key CX Metrics: rNPS vs. tNPS
The end of the year is approaching and for many of us, that means holiday preparations. I’ve already seen some houses decorated with lights and trees and I must admit I’m enjoying them. For some of us, this time of year also means year-end reporting of financials and performance metrics. Included in that may be your annual CX relationship study key metrics like NPS or OSat.
Real-Time CX - Forrester
Today’s Leaders Must Heed AI Advice For Future Disruptors How To Reconcile Your Key CX Metrics: rNPS vs.
In North America, Mobile Banking Apps Are Sufficient But Undifferentiated
Forrester recently evaluated mobile banking apps in Canada and the US in our latest Digital Experience Review™ (DXR). It shows that: Banks’ apps are barely keeping up with customers’ needs and expectations. Mobile banking usage is rising and evolving, and the pace of change has been accelerating since 2020. Yet few customers feel their primary bank’s app is markedly better than other brands’ (fewer than one in three feel this way in both the US and Canada).
US and Canadian 2024 NPS Results - Another Year of Decline
Forrester recently published Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) rankings for brands in the United States and Canada. As part of our annual Customer Experience Benchmark Survey, we surveyed 98,363 consumers in the United States and 43,324 Canadian consumers, and asked about their likelihood to recommend brands they interacted with in the past 12 months, as a measure of customer loyalty.
Get ready for genAI chatbots: The state of conversational AI
Talk about change!!! As we approach the two-year anniversary of the announcement of OpenAI’s launch of GPT 3.5, conversational AI has been reinvented to incorporate generative AI (genAI) to take advantage of the many ways this technology can make self-service applications smarter.
What To Do With The New Customer Experience Management Standards
I have several friends who are public school teachers. As with many teachers, they love the core mission of education but get frustrated by the administrative aspects of their jobs. Two of the most cumbersome are frequent changes in curriculum and state teaching standards. CX leaders face a similar challenge. In recognition of CX Day 2024, Bain & Company, in collaboration with Kantar and Qualtrics, released a new set of Global Standards for customer experience teams.
What To Do With The New Customer Experience Management Standards
I have several friends who are public-school teachers. As with many teachers, they love the core mission of education but get frustrated by the administrative aspects of their jobs. Two of the most cumbersome are frequent changes in curriculum and state teaching standards. Customer experience (CX) leaders face a similar challenge. In recognition of CX Day 2024, Bain & Company, in collaboration with Kantar and Qualtrics, released a new set of global standards for customer experience teams.
CX Summit North America Day 1: Exploring The Boundless Potential Of Humans + AI
CX Summit North America is in full swing, and the atmosphere in Nashville is electric. This is absolutely my favorite time of year – I love getting together with all of our attendees and my fellow analysts to share our latest research, learn from one another, and help build the future together. Yesterday, we had our highest ever attendance at our pre-day events — workshops, industry, sessions, certification kickoff, and the Forrester Women’s Leadersip Forum.
Introducing Forrester’s Interactive Wave Experience
We’re excited today to announce the launch of an updated experience for The Forrester Wave. We’ve made some thoughtful, client-focused upgrades that will allow Forrester Decisions and Forrester Market Insights clients to easily customize and compare vendors included in Forrester Wave reports and create shortlists based on their specific needs. In a nutshell, the key updates clients will see include: A new interactive digital experience (DX) to customize the Wave results.
Overall Canada Customer Experience Quality Drops To A Historic Low
Forrester has just released the results from its annual Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) rankings. Unfortunately, Canadian consumer perceptions of CX quality have dropped for an unprecedented third year in a row and are now at their lowest point since the inception of the CX Index. What’s more, performance dropped in all three dimensions of Forrester’s CX Index score — effectiveness, ease, and emotion — that measure CX quality.
US Health Insurer CX Quality Plummets To A Five-Year Low
There’s just no way to sugarcoat this: US Health Insurer CX Index ratings for 2024 have landed with a resounding thud. This is the second time since 2021 that the industry average rating had a statistically significant decline – and it’s easy to see why: Ten brands scored their lowest ratings in five years. Even perennial high-scorers like Humana and Kaiser Permanente had statistically significant declines.
Customer Experience Quality in US Falls To An All-Time Low
Forrester has just released the results from its annual Customer Experience Index (CX IndexTM) Survey. Unfortunately, US consumer perceptions of CX quality have dropped for an unprecedented third year in a row and are now at their lowest point since the inception of the CX Index. What’s more, performance dropped in all three dimensions of CX quality — effectiveness, ease, and emotion. Additional details on how brands performed include: Declines at the brand level were broader and steeper than ever.
What To Do Next About Your Customer Advocacy Platform
The low-key December 21 announcement that Jigsaw, part of the ESW Capital portfolio, acquired customer advocacy and community platform Influitive has fueled post-holiday chatter among customer marketers, vendors, and strategy and services consultants. Fourteen-year-old Influitive played a tremendous role in elevating B2B customer advocacy from “random acts of references” to strategic engagement with advocate storytellers. But the company’s path was uneven.
2023 Canada Net Promoter Score (NPS) Rankings: Industries Lose Gains Made in 2022
Forrester just published The Canada Net Promoter Rankings, 2023 report, which includes the Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) and industry rank for 100 brands across nine industries. We asked over 39,000 Canadian consumers in our annual Customer Experience Benchmark Survey about their likelihood to recommend brands that they interacted with in the past 12 months, using the standard NPS question and calculation. We found the following: Net Promoter Score has dropped or stagnated for all industries.
Member Experience - Forrester
AI Regulation In The US, Vibe Coding, Click To Cancel Hits Home Low Survey Response Rates: Are You Asking The Wrong Question? Financial Firms Offer Laid-Off Government Employees A Chance To … Spend More Money?! How To Reconcile Your Key CX Metrics: rNPS vs.
The $1M Mistake: Why Localization Prioritization Misses The Mark
How’s this for a challenge? “We want you to manage IT for the regional offices. Well, part of it. You won’t know who’s working on the other parts. No, there’s no software to knit everything together – we can’t justify the spend. No, we don’t know the overall spend. You’ll have enough budget to do about 20% of what people want. No, we haven’t got any data on what people want. But we do know that they’re unhappy with the quality.” This is the sort of madness that localization managers live in.
If It's January, It Must Be Time For CES 2024
Now that we’re done with a December’s worth of wholesome family enjoyment and good-natured holiday fun, it’s time for our annual retreat to the land of jingling-jangling slot machines and questionable moral decisions. Yes, It’s time for CES in Las Vegas! Much like the city it calls home, the show has changed character, evolving from its consumer electronics heritage to a platform that is relevant to every brand in how it interacts with its customers.
How To Capitalize On Conversational Search
New year, new search! In 2024, conversational search will grow because of generative AI’s integration into search engine results pages (SERPs). This growth will be most pronounced on Google and, to lesser extents, on Bing, Amazon, and TikTok. Rather than getting instant answers to ad hoc questions, consumers will have complex and engaging conversations with SERPs full of follow-up questions and AI-generated answers. As a result, clicks will decline, necessitating the monetization of impressions.
2023 Net Promoter Score (NPS) Benchmarks for U.S. Industries
Forrester just published The US Net Promoter Rankings 2023 The US Net Promoter Rankings, 2023 report, which includes the Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) and industry rank for 221 brands across 13 industries. We asked over 96,000 US consumers in our annual Customer Experience Benchmark Survey about their likelihood to recommend brands that they interacted with in the past 12 months, using the standard NPS question and calculation. We found the following: Net Promoter Score has dropped in most industries.
September 2023
September 2023 Magazine Features The Best CRM Software, Solutions, and Innovators: The 2023 CRM Industry Awards the Editors // 31 Aug 2023 Our 22nd annual awards recognize the vendors and innovators that shone the brightest in the past year. The Best CRM Software and Solutions: The 2023 CRM Industry Leader Awards the Editors // 31 Aug 2023 Our top five picks in 11 categories point the way forward with the best products and capabilities hitting the market in customer service, marketing, and sales.
Where Should CX Leaders Spend Their Budgets in 2024?
By Pete Jacques, principal analyst, Forrester Planning season is fast approaching. Leaders across organizations are again facing difficult investment decisions as they navigate ever-present technology disruptions (this means you, generative AI).
From Data To Dollars: Where CMOs Should Guide Marketing Technology Investment To Increase Customer Obsession
(cowritten with Research Associate Julia Swerdlow) It’s not new that marketing technology (martech) plays a central role in enabling B2B organizations’ marketing strategies. In fact, more than half of B2B marketing leaders invest over 10% of their total marketing budget in technology, per Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2023. And investments are expected to grow, with over two-thirds of B2B marketers surveyed saying that they plan to increase their martech budget over the next 12 months.
Empowering banks with Digital Cash Management Platforms
Businesses across the globe are dealing with a fast-paced digital world, rising customer expectations and economic uncertainties. In such an environment, it is imperative that they manage their cash flows well to finance their growth ambitions and mitigate financial risks. Corporates source these cash management services from their corporate banking partners. Banks on the other hand are often burdened with antiquated technologies and must transform their corporate banking systems.
CMOs, Generative AI On Your Mind?
I do not have to convince anyone today that Generative AI (genAI) technology is a huge trend and a potentially massive disruption to the way work gets done. You know something is incredibly popular when your next-door neighbor stops you outside your door and starts talking about the out-of-the-world benefits (or their fears) of the technology. Or when your not-so-tech-savvy relative calls and asks about the certification she needs to specialize in the technology.
You Must Optimize Your IT Networks To Achieve Success In Your Digital Store Initiatives
If you didn’t catch my last blog on business optimized networks … A business optimized network (BON) embraces customer-centric principals and the five tenets of virtual network infrastructure (VNI) within its design and operation. Most networks are not designed to be business differentiators, but rather to enable IT connectivity. Adopting a business optimized network gives businesses a leg up in the digital era.
Are You Prepared to Include CX Metrics in Earnings Calls?
Hardly any of the executives who include customer experience (CX) metrics in their quarterly earnings calls do it well. Forrester recommends avoiding CX metrics entirely. Stick to metrics that describe key business results and reflect the strategic goals of the organization — like revenue, profit, or customer retention — at least until you’re sure that your CX measurement program has enough rigor to directly link customers’ experiences with business outcomes.
Introducing The European Financial Services Customer Trust Index
The future of banking is built on trust. Considering the current volatility in financial markets, the unraveling of the trust crisis ensuing the collapse of SVB and Credit Suisse, and the impact of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis on customers’ personal finances, earning and maintaining customers’ trust is an imperative. Forrester defines trust as: Confidence in the high probability that a person or organization will spark a specific positive outcome in a relationship.
Predictive Analytics - Forrester
Blog Learn the right questions to ask and the right tactics to employ to improve customer survey response rates. Blog Discover how AIOps revolutionizes IT operations with essential functionalities, advanced capabilities, and strategies to overcome adoption challenges, as detailed in Forrester’s “Drive IT Excellence with AIOps” report. Blog Emerging technologies are transforming digital experiences, which are evolving to become more human-centered, assistive, anticipatory, and agentic.
Starting The Conversation: Plan Right For Acute Care At Home Programs
Another congestive heart failure (CHF) flare-up with the same treatment regimen. But this time it looks different. There is no hospital gown, loud alarms, or harsh lights making it hard to sleep. Instead, you wake up at home, in your own bed and wearing your own clothes. Nurses visit twice a day in-person. A physician calls and you answer on the TV screen. Meals arrive at your doorstep.
The Canada CX Index 2023 Results Indicate Falling CX Quality
It was a tough year for Canadian brands. The Canada Customer Experience Index Rankings, 2023 show brands falling short and backsliding on performance. Getting underneath the hood, we see brands facing diverging fates. Fewer brands incurred significant drops in CX quality in 2023 compared to 2022. But when there were drops, they were more severe on average than last year. The overall outcome is the lowest level of CX quality for Canadian brands since Forrester started tracking it in 2016.
US Health Insurers’ CX In 2023: Stable, Trending Towards Stagnant
If there’s a hair’s breadth width between keeping pace and treading water, the US health insurance industry is balancing right on it. In our latest report, The US Health Insurers Customer Experience Index Rankings, 2023, we reviewed and dissected the latest CX Index™ data for the industry—and became keenly aware of just how many things haven’t changed. On the one hand, that’s fairly comforting.
US Health Insurers’ CX In 2023: Stable, Trending Toward Stagnant
If there’s a hair’s breadth between keeping pace and treading water, the US health insurance industry is balancing right on it. In our latest report, The US Health Insurers Customer Experience Index Rankings, 2023, we reviewed and dissected the latest Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) data for the industry — and became keenly aware of just how many things haven’t changed. On the one hand, that’s fairly comforting.
AI And B2B Marketing: Three Opportunities And Challenges To Ponder
For those of us old enough to remember “The Jetsons” — or those of us young enough to consider the science-fantasy series from the ’60s as “retro cool” — it was always fun to watch George Jetson spend his workday pushing the single red button on his computer. George complained a lot about his hard job, and as a kid, I remember wondering what the heck that red button did. What I now know for sure is that — whatever it did — it was using AI.
US CX Quality Falls For An Unprecedented Second Consecutive Year
US brands struggled to deliver great customer experiences in 2023, leading CX Index scores to drop for an unprecedented second year in a row. While two industries were able to beat the odds and achieve better results, most stumbled on their CX journey. Only 6% of brands saw a significant increase in CX quality, compared to 10% last year. What Caused CX Quality To Drop in 2023? Let’s start by backing up. Great customer experiences hit the mark on three key criteria: ease, effectiveness, and emotion.
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