Editorial
The Gist
- Total Experience takes center stage. Forrester introduced a new Brand Experience Index to complement its CX Index, helping brands align promise and delivery across silos.
- AI boosts humans, not replaces them. Speakers reframed AI as a network amplifier — enhancing employee capabilities and enabling more contextual, humanlike experiences.
- Metrics shape momentum. Misaligned metrics can erode team energy and distort CX priorities. The right measurements must reflect total experience outcomes — not legacy performance benchmarks.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — About 1,500 customer experience, digital-business and B2C marketing leaders converged here in Nashville June 23-26 to better understand the secret to “faster revenue, higher revenue, and a better overall experience.”
This is how Forrester CEO George Colony introduced the concept of the “Total Experience” at his company's CX Summit North America. In the world of total experience, brand promise becomes aligned with often unpredictable and unknowable omnichannel customer expectations.
This year’s conference went well beyond simply making the case for great CX. In fact, Shar Van Boskirk’s Day 2 keynote emphasized that great CX isn’t just a requirement, it’s table stakes. Additionally, there was a strong focus on tying CX to return on investment this year, including justifying investments in customer and employee experience as a unified investment that can pay off as a revenue potential of 3.5x or more.
This year, Forrester unveiled a few concepts and measurements at the show:
- The Total Experience, or the the combination of brand experience and customer experience, has the potential for revenue gains, yet requires breaking down internal silos.
- The Brand Experience Index, which adds to its existing Customer Experience Index to create a new combined Total Experience quadrant of measurement for brands to better understand how they are reaching and retaining customers.
- The Network Effect of AI, which makes the argument that AI augments, not replaces, employees when deployed effectively, and has the potential to drive growth, not simply save money.
- The Annual Global Customer Experience Index Rankings showed that CX hit an all-time low in North America this year.
Let’s look at three overall themes from the conference that tie these concepts together.
Related Article: Marketing Promised. CX Didn't Deliver. Here's the Cost.
Table of Contents
- Winning Over (and Retaining) the Distracted Consumer
- Looking at (and Measuring) the Total Experience
- Employees Plus AI Create a Network Effect for CX
- Conclusion: Turning CX Complexity Into Competitive Advantage
Winning Over (and Retaining) the Distracted Consumer
Kelsey Chickering, principal analyst at Forrester, opened Day 1 by reminding us that consumers juggle roughly 35,000 micro-decisions every day: searching, scrolling, ghosting, buying, returning and leaving reviews, creating a messy, non-linear path no single department can fix in isolation.
Total experience, according to Chickering, is the sum of all interactions with your brand that shapes consumer perception. It’s not fixed, it’s fluid, as consumers reshape their expectations based on their experiences.
As Forrester’s own Global Customer Experience Index Rankings showed yet another annual decline in customer experience across brands, all the talk about experience has not resulted in a turnaround. In fact, most consumers say that brands don’t live up to their promises, leaving them, at best, disappointed or, at worst, betrayed or abandoned, according to Chickering.
With attention as a depleting asset, and consumers overall less pleased with CX from brands, she encouraged the need to “win them over, commit to the mission. Choose wisely. Anticipate their needs, build skills over time and manage their expectations.”
How to do this echoed a common refrain throughout several of the sessions as well: collapse the silos between marketing, CX and commerce so the brand shows up consistently, regardless of where it is experienced.
Looking at (and Measuring) the Total Experience
Brand experience and customer experience are “two sides of the same coin,” according to Forrester’s Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. In his keynote, Chatterjee unveiled Forrester’s new Brand Experience Index, designed to work in tandem with their refined CX Index™ to offer a complete view of what it really means to deliver a Total Experience, and how doing so directly powers growth.
Chatterjee backed up the case with math to show that organizations that invest in both brand experience (BX) and CX in an integrated way can see revenue growth up to 3.5x higher than those that optimize one while neglecting the other. Forrester’s research also highlighted case studies across banking, automotive and retail, where syncing brand promises with customer realities paid off in the form of increased acquisition and retention with data pulled from 413 brands in 10 industries, 13 countries and 362,249 consumers.
Designing For Humanlike Experiences
To capitalize on this opportunity, it requires interfaces to become more human, conversational and anticipatory, or put more bluntly: stop designing experiences that ask customers to think like your org chart.
Forrester’s AJ Joplin, lead analyst for Forrester's research on experience design (XD), design organizations and design leadership, shared in her keynote that customers now expect something very different than cold, reactive UI, but instead want interfaces that are intuitive, assistive, and even humanlike. Joplin’s keynote made the case that companies must urgently evolve their design strategies to match the reality of next-gen experiences shaped by AI, automation and rising customer expectations.
The key insight wasn’t just “make it simple.” It was making it feel human without pretending to be human. This shift requires a retooling of both design practices and technical infrastructure. You don’t get a fluid, responsive experience by duct-taping a new interface onto a legacy workflow.
And finally, building this total experience requires a way to measure success. As Forrester’s Angelina Gennis, an analyst in the Future of Work practice, shared at the opening of Day 3, the right metrics shape culture; the wrong ones corrode energy. In practice, this means that when companies pursue experience transformation with a “what gets measured gets done” mindset, they often forget to ask what exactly they’re measuring — and why. Her keynote exposed how misaligned or misused metrics can erode employee energy, distort customer priorities and quietly sabotage the Total Experience.
She argued that metrics shape behavior — not just individual performance, but how teams collaborate, how leaders prioritize and how organizations define success. When the signals are wrong, the culture slowly tilts away from customers, even as the numbers say otherwise.
Related Article: What Is Customer Experience Design? Benefits & Best Practices
Employees Plus AI Create a Network Effect for CX
There is reason for concern about the role of AI in potential changing and eliminating roles across industries, though there is room for some optimism. Jay Pattisall, a marketing analyst for Forrester, closed Day 2 by focusing on how AI, when deployed strategically, can potentially employees more powerful — not obsolete. His central argument: the network effects of AI can supercharge human capability and fundamentally reshape how organizations deliver customer experience, marketing and digital business outcomes.
Pattisall laid out a clear progression: companies initially use AI for cost efficiency (e.g., automation of repetitive tasks), then move into productivity gains (supporting human decision-making) and ultimately reach the highest tier — effective experiences (where AI and people work in concert to create more seamless, contextual and empathetic interactions).
This goes beyond answering customer questions faster, routing talent more intelligently, empowering frontline workers and accelerating experience innovation. He also stressed that these effects don’t emerge in isolation. Like any network, the value compounds as more nodes, or — in this case, tools, processes, and people — are connected in smarter ways.
Most importantly, the importance of thinking about enhancing marketing performance, rather than simply productivity or efficiency gains, means that the cheaper, faster, better paradigm has the potential to shift.
Key Themes From Forrester CX Summit 2025
This table highlights the central ideas presented at the event and their relevance to CX, marketing and digital business leaders.
| Theme | Key Insight | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Total Experience | Integration of brand and customer experience through Forrester’s new Brand Experience Index | Aligning brand promise and delivery across touchpoints drives trust and up to 3.5x revenue growth |
| Collapsing Silos | Unifying CX, marketing and commerce functions to deliver cohesive experiences | Disjointed internal structures undermine brand consistency and customer trust |
| Customer Expectations | Consumers are disappointed by brands failing to meet promises | Rising expectations demand proactive, responsive and emotionally intelligent CX |
| Humanlike Design | Shift toward intuitive, assistive and conversational interfaces | Legacy UIs no longer meet modern needs shaped by AI and automation |
| AI as a Multiplier | AI amplifies human talent rather than replacing it | Combining people and AI creates a network effect that enhances marketing and CX outcomes |
| Metrics and Culture | New measurements like the Total Experience quadrant shape team behavior and strategic focus | Misaligned metrics corrode employee energy and distort customer priorities |
Conclusion: Turning CX Complexity Into Competitive Advantage
Across three days, speakers at Forrester CX Summit North America reframed distraction as an opportunity to unify touchpoints, measure brand and CX on the same scoreboard, make interfaces more human, operationalize customer obsession and let AI redistribute grunt work so people can elevate the conversation and do more meaningful work that has a greater impact with customers.
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There is a lot of work required by brands to achieve this, however, and customers are getting impatient with disconnected and dissatisfying experiences. Seizing this opportunity means overcoming the challenges of creating a great experience, unifying disconnected silos and putting the measurements in place to track success.
These past three days, however, shed some light on how to pull ahead in a time when CX quality is a differentiating factor.
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