Forrester Unveils the Total Experience Score: A Unified Metric for Measuring Brand and Customer Experience Alignment

Forrester announced the launch of its Total Experience Score, a pioneering metric designed to assess how effectively companies align their brand promise with both customer and noncustomer experiences. Released as part of the Global Total Experience Score Rankings, 2025, the new framework underscores the business value of integrating brand experience (BX) and customer experience (CX)—two dimensions that, when harmonized, can unlock up to 3.5x revenue growth and significantly increase customer loyalty.

Forrester’s research reveals that BX and CX are inherently connected. To drive sustainable growth, organizations must evaluate these experiences together through a unified lens—ensuring consistency in what they promise and what they deliver.

The Total Experience Score integrates Forrester’s new Brand Experience Index™ (BX Index™) with the long-established Customer Experience Index™ (CX Index™) to produce a single, comprehensive score. This metric reflects how both customers and noncustomers perceive a brand across the full lifecycle—from awareness and consideration to engagement and loyalty. It is the only measurement that captures the combined impact of brand perception and lived experience.

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Global Insights from the 2025 Rankings

Forrester’s Total Experience Score is based on insights from over 360,000 consumers across 413 brands, spanning 10 industries in 13 countries. The findings highlight key regional trends:

• North America: Direct banks emerged as top performers, achieving the highest average industry scores in both the U.S. and Canada. Conversely, health insurers in the U.S. and auto/home insurers in Canada received the lowest average scores.
• Europe: A significant gap between customer and noncustomer perceptions was evident. Eighteen brands in the region scored more than twice as high with existing customers compared to noncustomers. Investment firms in the UK led in performance, while Swedish banks ranked lowest.
• Asia Pacific: Investment firms topped the charts in India and Singapore, while banks led in Australia. Meanwhile, banks in India and Singapore and auto/home insurers in Australia scored at the bottom.

A New Growth Framework for Experience-Driven Strategy

To calculate a brand’s Total Experience Score, Forrester evaluated each brand’s performance on both the BX and CX indices. These results are visualized through the Growth Grid—a strategic diagnostic tool that illustrates how well a brand is performing in “winning” new customers (BX) and “serving” existing ones (CX).

By mapping the customer and noncustomer components on the Growth Grid, organizations can identify opportunities for both acquisition and retention-led revenue growth. The Total Experience Score acts as a compass for companies aiming to strengthen brand equity and customer satisfaction simultaneously.

“Driving growth requires a dual focus — shaping brand perceptions that inspire consideration and loyalty and strengthening them through consistent, customer-centric experiences,” said Keith Johnston, Group Research Director at Forrester. “While BX and CX are powerful revenue drivers individually, when integrated into a cohesive total experience, they amplify one another to deliver even greater financial returns. Companies can use the growth grid as both a diagnostic and prescriptive tool to shape their brand and business strategy. Additionally, this framework allows companies to assess their competitive standing as well as performance across brands within their own portfolio.”

Strategic Access Through Forrester Decisions

The Total Experience Score, along with BX Index and CX Index rankings, is now available within the Forrester Decisions research portfolio. Clients subscribing to Customer Experience, B2C Marketing Executives, and Digital Business & Strategy services can access these annual benchmarking tools to measure the synergy between their brand and customer experience strategies—and act on insights that drive measurable business outcomes.