This report introduces Forrester’s global Employee Experience Index (EX Index™), a key measure that describes the EX impact on a company’s efforts to improve its Total Experience Score. The EX Index evaluates employee sentiment about how organizations empower, enable, and inspire workers, leading to increased retention, effectiveness, and innovation readiness. Each organization is categorized relative to its global industry peers to capture the impact that EX has on the organization’s ability to reach its goals related to brand experience (BX) and customer experience (CX). Organizations are either helped or hurt by their EX as they work to grow with both noncustomers and customers.

Extended reality (XR) is an emerging technology with a long-term benefit horizon that will take more than five years to deliver tangible benefits for most firms. In consumer use cases, XR is effective — when consumers use it. But despite significant investments from major players such as Apple and Meta, too few do. Companies dabbling in XR today can continue to do so based on the criteria shared in this report, but don’t expect a host of adjacent XR investments to boost your efforts in 2026. Read this report to consider the potential business value of extended reality.

Customers are changing, the business environment is ever in flux, and new AI tools are making everybody question everything. You must establish processes, patterns, and cultural rhythms so employees can confront these challenges and bring their motivated, creative, engaged selves to the task of improving customer outcomes. This report helps you hone your leadership approach so that what you do — how you speak and act — invites teams to be as customer obsessed as your business’s mission statement suggests. Give people key resources and model five specific leadership behaviors, and they’ll respond with energy and commitment to organizational and customer success.

Hybrid work became the predominant model for work as a result of the pandemic years, for those roles where remote work is possible. It still is, despite the headlines indicating the contrary, with 30% of economic labor performed in the US each day done from home. Even as many debate reverting to five-day, in-office work policies, most leaders do so unaware of the actual effectiveness of hybrid work or of the crucial policy enforcement decisions they will have to make regardless of where their hybrid policy lands. Don’t fly similarly blind into 2025; before you continue or adjust your policies, read this report to plan how you’ll decide, manage, and enforce your hybrid work policy.

Companies invest billions annually in customer, brand, and employee experience initiatives yet treat them as fundamentally separate domains with different owners, budgets, and measures of success. The result is a blind spot: No cross-company dataset has existed to show how employee experience factors link to customer satisfaction and brand experience outcomes, leaving leaders unable to make a credible business case for investing in linking them. Forrester’s Employee Experience Index (EX Index™) research brings just this capacity to Forrester’s total experience methodology; the findings enhance our understanding of what it takes to deliver sustainable customer and brand excellence.

We reveal the scores of 16 US mass-market auto manufacturers that we analyzed as part of Forrester’s Customer Experience Benchmark Survey, 2024. We also identify the types of experiences that customers prefer and the drivers and emotions that affect loyalty the most.

We reveal the scores of three Canadian luxury auto manufacturers that we analyzed as part of Forrester’s Customer Experience Benchmark Survey, 2024. We also identify the types of experiences that customers prefer and the drivers and emotions that effect loyalty the most.

We reveal the scores of nine US luxury auto manufacturers that we analyzed as part of Forrester’s Customer Experience Benchmark Survey, 2024. We also identify the types of experiences that customers prefer and the drivers and emotions that affect loyalty the most.

Forrester’s customer obsession leadership maturity assessment helps you understand how your individual style, behaviors, and attributes affect your ability to lead your organization to customer obsession. Leaders who enable customer obsession model how to look beyond the distractions of day-to-day business to facilitate value creation for their customers. They obsessively create and deliver increasing value to customers even as technology and market conditions evolve. This report helps leaders understand their critical role in achieving customer obsession and assess their individual readiness to augment customer obsession within their teams and across their organizations.

Forrester’s model combines existing tools with cutting-edge neurolinguistic processing capabilities and genAI using a privacy-by-design approach that protects employees’ identities while unlocking deeper insights into their sentiments, emotions, and experiences.Join David Brodeur-Johnson and James McQuivey, PhD for a conversation about what deep listening is, what it can do, and how to make it a reality for your organization.