Dive Brief:
- USAA provides the best total experience out of any U.S. brand in 2026, according to Forrester. The research and advisory firm released its 2026 global total experience rankings, which examined over 400 brands based on more than 350,000 consumer perceptions, earlier this month.
- Chewy, The Home Depot and Costco provide the top total experience among U.S. retailers, according to the rankings.
- Among the U.S. brands Forrester analyzed, just over half increased their total experience scores, while 4% saw declines. Globally, 41% of brands improved their total experience scores, and only 3% of brands saw scores drop.
Dive Insight:
A company’s overall experience is not only its brand’s promise, the experience it provides prospective clients or the experience it provides current customers. It’s the sum of it all, according to Forrester.
Looking at experience from this vantage point “is absolutely the right choice,” Menon Billingsley, CX solution strategist at Qualtrics, told CX Dive.
Forrester’s total experience metric measures a company’s ability to acquire new customers, deliver this experience, and sustain loyalty.
“It's a virtuous cycle. None of these things are in isolation,” Billingsley said. “However, we are still organized from an infrastructure perspective within an organization where brand has a budget, and customer experience has a budget, and HR has a budget, and maybe our people operations [team] doesn't even know our CX teams.”
Chewy performed particularly well, reaching a customer score of 78.6 on a 100-point scale. Its noncustomer score only reached 52.5, with the two scores averaging out to a 65.5 overall total experience score. The brand has focused on reliability with its Autoship subscription service, which accounted for 84% of total net sales in its latest quarter.
Consistency matters, Billingsley said.
“Those brands have continuity, they have established trust,” Billingsley said.
While Chewy is an online retailer, The Home Depot offers omnichannel experience, and Costco predominantly focuses on in-store experience, they show up for customers in predictable ways.
“It may not be that they have similar distribution models or the way that they provide the journey, but it could be that every time I go to Costco, I know what to expect,” Billingsley said. “Every time I go to Chewy, I know that you know what I order for my pet, and I know that it shows up on time, and nobody's going hungry because my dog food showed up late.
As consumer sentiment declines and technological changes disrupt the status quo, brands that are providing a consistent experience that aligns with expectations are more likely to win, Billingsley said.
