Most firms manage their customer, brand, and employee experiences the way one would manage an orchestra with each section in a different room: strings in one, brass in another, the percussion doing whatever percussion does, with each group convinced it’s the concert — different owners, different budgets, different scorecards.

The result is a structural blind spot: Leaders sense that employee experience (EX) matters, but they struggle to prove how it impacts customers, the brand, and financial performance. With Forrester’s new Employee Experience Index (EX Index™), that gap is closing because we can show empirically how different dimensions of EX quality impact customer and brand outcomes. The result is a clear affirmative to a critical question: Does EX quality act as a booster or a barrier to your total experience outcomes?

The Future Of EX Is Impact, Not Engagement

Organizations have known how to measure employee engagement for decades, but they have a mixed track record for improving it sustainably. This is partly because few have the data and insights to link it to business outcomes, and without that, EX investments compete for scare resources with initiatives that have more direct and measurable ROI. But it’s also because improving EX requires several organizational silos to work together while holding each other accountable. And without sufficient evidence, it’s hard to overcome organizational inertia.

Yet the evidence consistently shows that high EX quality is strongly linked to better customer satisfaction, brand equity, and even stock performance — so strong that firms with high EX quality enjoy 2.3–3.8% higher annual stock returns than their peers. The same studies also show that high EX quality links to earnings predictability and adaptability in disruptive times. So if your firm isn’t linking EX, customer experience (CX), and brand experience (BX) today, you have both untapped growth potential and hidden, unpriced risks.

Forrester’s EX Index Changes The Total Experience Conversation

To create our new EX Index, we began by analyzing sentiment data from half a million people working at 3,000 organizations. We focused our EX Index analysis on the nearly 200 organizations across seven industries in 11 countries where we also have Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) and Brand Experience Index (BX Index™) data. Our BX Index and CX Index data shows how brands are positioned to win new customers and serve existing customers.

We calculated the EX Index scores based on 10 variables related to the three dimensions of EX: how employees are empowered, enabled, and inspired. We then categorized the scores into EX “impact” categories by comparing companies with their industry peers and determining whether their scores leave them with a positive, neutral, or negative EX impact.

By analyzing EX impact alongside our BX Index and CX Index data, we can now show whether an organization has the employee engagement necessary to reach for higher total experience outcomes or, if already a leader, sustain their position. Organizations that have positive EX impact will have an easier time reaching their total experience goals; those with negative EX impact are trying to push forward into a headwind. It’s possible but harder.

Knowing all this makes it easier for leaders to justify investments in EX. Instead of asking how to raise engagement scores, leaders can ask about the employee experience conditions that most directly influence customer retention, brand equity, and, ultimately, revenue trajectory.

This alignment between EX, BX, and CX are what you want as you work toward your total experience ambitions in 2026 and beyond. To learn more about how Forrester’s EX Index can help you, read Forrester’s Global Employee Experience Index Rankings, 2026 and Introducing Forrester’s Employee Experience Index, two new reports now available to Forrester clients.

Whether or not you’re a Forrester client, we hope you’ll join us at an upcoming Forrester CX event to hear Research Director James McQuivey, PhD, deliver keynotes on this topic. I’ll be at CX Forum East and CX Forum West delivering track sessions on the EX Index.