CX leaders must justify investing in customer journey improvements. This guide shares the five steps CX leaders should work through to make a business case for improving a customer journey. It also includes a template for summarizing the journey business case on one page.

Most firms still invest in customer journeys as if they’re all equally important; they’re not. Hygiene journeys must work flawlessly to protect trust; table-stakes journeys must keep pace with competitors without copycatting; a few signature journeys deserve outsize investment because they differentiate the brand and drive growth. Treating all journeys the same spreads resources thin. By managing journeys as a strategic portfolio rather than a loose collection of roadmaps and initiatives, leaders can align constrained capacity to what matters most to customers and the business. This report shows how to run a journey portfolio: Stabilize hygiene, match table-stakes, and overinvest in signature journeys.

Immersive experiences drive alignment, confidence, and action, as well as change mindsets. As customer journeys stretch across more teams, systems, and automated decisions, organizations struggle to align on what to do next. Insight piles up, but action stalls. Immersive experiences make complexity tangible by putting leaders and teams inside real situations — observing customers, walking through journeys, and practicing decisions — rather than asking them to decode slides or reports. This report shows why immersion has become essential, how to design experiences that drive real decisions (not just engagement), and how to know when not to use it.

Immersive experiences take different forms — and each form is suited to a different kind of decision. When leaders apply the wrong format, immersion becomes overkill. When they apply the right one, it accelerates alignment, confidence, and action. This report outlines six immersive formats used by leading organizations, explains what each solves, and distills the mechanisms that make each work.

Customers can achieve the goal of their journey and still feel uncertain, frustrated, or less loyal afterward. Forrester launched an annual journey benchmarking study to understand what makes journeys so valuable to customers that they reward the brand with their positive emotions and loyalty. The study examines what drives customer perceptions of value across different […]

Customer experience (CX) leaders enter the budget planning cycle for 2027 under greater pressure to scale AI amid volatility. While global CX leaders are optimistic about their resources, organizations risk scaling fragmented data, inconsistent processes, and weak CX foundations — ultimately amplifying dysfunction. To succeed, CX leaders must fund core capabilities like connected data, journey ownership, and governance; cut spend on outdated and low-value activities; and experiment with AI-driven ways to enhance decision-making. This report gives CX leaders practical guidance on where to increase, decrease, avoid, and experiment with CX investments to drive sustainable impact in 2027.

When customers reach their journey goals, it leads to positive feelings about the journey, improved brand perception, and higher intended retention and cross-sell. Our data on UK banks shows that many who report achieving their goals remain unsure whether they truly succeeded, which significantly dampens the positive effect of goal achievement. This report helps CX leaders understand the role of goal achievement in journey emotion and brand outcomes.

When customers perceive a journey as valuable, they leave it feeling positive, leading to improved brand perception and higher loyalty. This report uses a subset of Forrester’s journey benchmark data, featuring three types of UK banking journeys and four specific journeys. It shows that the relative impact for four value lenses — goal achievement, value ratio, value shape, and baseline and emotional shift — on emotion varies per journey and that not every value lens has a significant influence on journey emotion in every journey.

Customers feel more positive after their journeys if they perceive the performance on key drivers of emotions as positive (value gains) rather than negative (value losses). Using data for UK banks, this report helps CX leaders understand how the key drivers of emotion vary per journey type. While banks should maintain focus on product fit and speed for “new product” journeys, they underperform on important drivers — like process clarity and speed for issue resolution — and overconcentrate on less impactful drivers, such as easy identification, for “account management” journeys. The report also discloses common customer pain points and how banks perform on drivers for each journey type.

How customers’ emotions shift between the start and the end of their journeys affects brand outcomes. Forrester’s journey benchmark data for banking shows that emotions improve over the course of journeys, with customers’ confidence increasing and anxiety decreasing across all journey types. However, customers experiencing negative shifts in emotion pose a risk for loyalty and brand perception. This report highlights UK banking customer emotions across three journey types, how they change during each journey, and the impact on brand outcomes.