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.