Six Lessons In Experience Leadership From Forrester’s 2026 Total Experience Honorees
A strong brand promise means little if the customer experience fails to deliver on it. Even well-designed experiences can fall short if employees don’t have sufficient tools, processes, or support. Forrester’s research on the total experience recognizes that all three of these elements must work in tandem. Our Total Experience Honor celebrates organizations that fulfill a compelling brand promise, empower an engaged workforce, and create experiences that deliver value for customers and the business.
At our CX Forum East and CX Forum West events in June, inaugural North American honorees The Home Depot and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield shared how they put those principles into practice. While their industries and customer relationships are very different, their stories point to six lessons about turning total experience into an organizational discipline.
- Anchor experience in what makes your company distinctive.
Home Depot’s approach starts with a clear sense of its role: helping consumers and professional customers get projects and jobs done. Stephanie Gordon, who leads the company’s loyalty team, described at CX Forum East how that purpose guides decisions across the business.
“We’re not trying to copy-paste somebody else’s strategy,” she said. “We’re not trying to be someone else. We’re trying to be more of Home Depot.”
That principle also shapes The Home Depot’s view of loyalty. Customers aren’t primarily coming for points, Gordon explained. They need the right products, knowledgeable associates, and tools that help them complete a project.
The lesson: Experience differentiation should start with the value that your organization is uniquely positioned to provide.
- Remove employee friction to improve customer experience.
Both honorees draw a direct line from employee experience to customer experience.
The Home Depot expresses that connection through its “inverted pyramid”: The CEO sits at the bottom, while customers and frontline associates are at the top, and the corporate office exists to support stores, which in turn serve customers.
CareFirst’s experience transformation made that connection tangible. When the company examined its digital capabilities, it found that customer service employees were moving among 8–20 screens to serve a member, creating friction for them and the people they support. CareFirst Chief Marketing Officer Mack McGee described how working with the service and technology teams to overhaul service-center tools reduced that friction. “We really wanted to show them we were committed to making their job better,” he said. “And we saw that right away. The positivity that we see from members who actually interact with our service folks really skyrocketed.”
CX leaders should look for these connections. Friction affecting employees often reaches the customer.
- Don’t let technology get ahead of the people using it.
As Home Depot expanded the use of stores as delivery hubs as part of a supply-chain transformation, technology advanced faster than employees’ capacity to support it. Store associates were serving customers while also managing inventory and tracking deliveries, Gordon recalled. The result was friction for associates and customers. The company responded by changing roles and processes so that frontline associates could focus on helping the customer in front of them.
CareFirst is applying a related principle to AI. Greg Barber, director of experience and market research, described an internal discussion about deploying member-facing AI in which the decision was made by the company to “move at the pace of trust.” CareFirst already uses AI internally, but Barber said its approach to customer-facing technology includes building foundational platforms, data, and operational capabilities while monitoring the experience.
- Use direct observation to make your data more useful.
Home Depot has no shortage of dashboards. As Gordon acknowledged on stage, “Data paralysis is real.” One important source of context comes from the company’s quarterly “get in store days,” when corporate employees work alongside store associates. The experience helps employees interpret data about how customers shop and what associates are reporting.
Similarly, while CX leaders need data, direct exposure to customers and employees can reveal the context behind the numbers.
- Earn the right to a deeper customer relationship.
CareFirst’s story offers an important lesson for organizations that want customers to engage more deeply with them.
McGee described CareFirst’s experience strategy through three connected ideas: choice, connection, and care, reflecting whether members can understand their options, get the information and support they need, and reach the right seamless care. Before the organization can expect members to rely on it for important healthcare decisions, it has to deliver during earlier interactions, from selecting coverage to accessing basic services.
“We talk a lot internally about earning the right to engage with our membership,” Barber added.
Because healthcare affects members’ health, finances, and families, CareFirst has to show that it is dependable and competent, he continued. A deeper relationship is earned through repeated experiences that give customers reason to trust the organization.
- Create shared accountability for experience.
CareFirst brought its executive team together to work through the metrics it would use to track experience, including indicators outside of traditional CX metrics. The goal was shared accountability across clinical, product, service, and other functions, recognizing that experience is how the organization brings its mission to life, not the responsibility of a single team.
Home Depot uses culture as a similar point of alignment. Gordon said its decisions consistently return to the company’s founding principles and the needs of associates and customers, giving employees a common reference point when decisions veer off course.
These practices get at the underlying lesson from both honorees: A total experience isn’t something a CX team can deliver independently. It depends on the decisions that people make across the organization about employees, technology, operations, and measurement, as well as the promises the company makes to customers.
The Home Depot and CareFirst show what happens when those decisions reinforce one another. The result is an organization better equipped to deliver the experience it has promised.