If you’ve ever felt late-summer sadness, you’re not alone. Perhaps it’s because days are getting shorter or you feel the impending sense of a return to dull routines. Mental health experts recommend getting outside as much as possible to boost Vitamin D intake and squeezing in that last beach read before Labor Day. You might also take solace in new Forrester research that shows consumer loyalty sentiments have rebounded a bit.

Net Promoter Scores Show Signs of Recovery

After several years of uneven performance, customer loyalty is showing encouraging signs of recovery. Results from Forrester’s newly published 2026 Global Net Promoter Score (NPS) Rankings, which examines the likelihood to recommend (advocacy) as a proxy of loyalty, suggest that many brands are rebuilding customer loyalty and associated sentiments like trust.

Our analysis reveals:

  • In the US and Canada, more brands improved than declined, with nearly one in five US brands and more than one-third of Canadian brands showing statistically significant improvements. These gains lifted industry performance, reversing a multi-year trend of declining advocacy.
  • The picture in Europe was more mixed but largely positive. Most industries remained stable, while several countries’ banking industries recorded meaningful gains.
  • Asia Pacific presented the greatest challenges. Most brands were statistically unchanged, but declines outnumbered improvements.

The broader takeaway is clear and positive: Customer advocacy is no longer moving uniformly downward. While many brands’ NPS results remain stuck in place, organizations that improve experiences are beginning to see measurable gains in customers’ willingness to recommend them.

Beat Summer Doldrums with Detailed Actions

Whether your brand has maintained level performance or made significant improvements over the past year, let Forrester help you take advantage of the momentum. Forrester clients can:

  • Dig deeper to understand the drivers of customer intent. Use Forrester’s research to understand more fully understand your Detractors, Promoters and key drivers of NPS. You can also gain insight into how these customer segments rate your brand on other important variables such as trust, brand value, and CX quality — factors that comprise Forrester’s Total Experience Score. Contact your account team to request deep-dive analyses for your brand or industry.
  • Call a friend. Schedule a guidance session with me to discuss scores from this report, trends over the past few years, and next steps for improving your customer loyalty and CX quality. 

Whether or not you’re currently a Forrester client, consider these actions:

  • Benchmark appropriately. If you measure NPS internally or through a third-party benchmark study, don’t compare your scores directly. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, since survey methodologies and sampling differ. Instead, examine your firm’s scores over time to see if they are moving in the same direction as your industry or key competitors. These answers will be more insightful and can help you with goal-setting.
  • Use all your data to gain insights. Unstructured and operational metrics are a key sources of insight for identifying root causes of customer discontent (i.e., Detractors). Cast your net wide to identify any source of info (qualitative or quantitative) that can help you identify journey steps that cause frustration and make it harder for customers to do business with you.

And don’t forget about that Vitamin D!

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