Forrester has unveiled its Employee Experience Index (EX Index).
The new measurement framework empirically links EX quality to customer satisfaction, brand equity, and financial performance.
Built from sentiment data covering half a million employees across 3,000 organizations, the index focuses its comparative analysis on nearly 200 companies across seven industries in 11 countries where Forrester also holds CX Index and Brand Experience Index data.
The headline stat from the study is that firms with high EX quality post 2.3 to 3.8 percent higher annual stock returns than their peers.
Forrester also found strong connections between EX quality and earnings predictability and organizational adaptability during periods of disruption.
Writing in the official blog, Principal Analyst David Johnson described the structural blind spot the index is designed to close:
“Most firms manage their customer, brand, and employee experiences the way one would manage an orchestra with each section in a different room: strings in one, brass in another, the percussion doing whatever percussion does, with each group convinced it's the concert.”
It's a sharp diagnosis of a problem CX leaders will recognize immediately.
When organizations have different owners, different budgets, and different scorecards, there is no clean way to show how the pieces connect.
Empowerment, Enablement, Inspiration – and Why They Matter in the Contact Center
The EX Index scores organizations across 10 variables grouped into three dimensions: how employees are empowered, enabled, and inspired.
Companies are then benchmarked against industry peers and placed into positive, neutral, or negative EX impact categories.
Those three pillars will be familiar to anyone running agent experience programs. Tooling investments, coaching frameworks, and workforce management strategies all map directly onto empowerment and enablement.
What Forrester is now offering is the ability to demonstrate what those investments actually produce at the customer and revenue level.
This could be highly valuable in contact center budget conversations. EX spending has historically struggled to compete against initiatives with a more direct and measurable ROI, as Johnson noted in the official blog:
“Instead of asking how to raise engagement scores, leaders can ask about the employee experience conditions that most directly influence customer retention, brand equity, and, ultimately, revenue trajectory.”
That reframe, from engagement metric to revenue driver, gives CX and contact center leaders a much stronger argument to take into the CFO's office.
The Total Experience Picture
The EX Index completes a trio alongside Forrester's CX Index and Brand Experience Index, forming what the firm calls a total experience view.
Critically, the relationship now runs in both directions. Organizations with positive EX impact have a structural advantage in hitting CX targets. Those with negative EX impact, as Forrester puts it, are “trying to push forward into a headwind.”
In contact center terms, that headwind shows up as agent attrition, inconsistent service delivery, and declining CSAT scores that take months to trace back to their root cause.
Keith Johnston, VP of Group Director at Forrester, writing in a related Forrester blog, outlined the broader commercial stakes:
“The brands pulling ahead aren't optimizing brand, customer, and employee experience in isolation — they're aligning them into a system that drives measurable growth.”
The contact center sits squarely at that intersection. Agents shape customer outcomes, represent the brand in every interaction, and are the primary subject of EX investment.
With Forrester now offering empirical evidence that EX quality has a measurable bearing on retention, revenue, and stock performance, the case for treating agent experience as a core CX strategy – not a separate HR concern – has never been stronger.
Forrester's full rankings are available in the Global Employee Experience Index Rankings, 2026 report.
