Challenges Facing Customer Experience Leaders And Their Teams
Customer experience leaders must drive growth and loyalty while navigating rising expectations, fragmented data, and tighter budgets.
- Proving CX ROI and business impact
- Turning insight into meaningful action across customer journeys
- Aligning the enterprise around shared customer outcomes
- Connecting customer, employee, and brand experiences
- Balancing AI innovation with consumer trust
To overcome these obstacles, CX leaders need to connect experience initiatives to measurable business outcomes, align stakeholders, and prioritize actions that deliver value.
Hear Forrester VP and Research Director Rick Parrish explain how Forrester can help CX leaders prove the value of CX and deliver on a total experience for customers.
The Data Behind Today’s CX Challenges
of CX decision-makers say their program clearly demonstrates financial benefits
of CX programs rely primarily on complaints for unstructured feedback
of CX programs cannot effectively quantify the monetary impact of CX issues
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Build A Customer-Obsessed Organization
Customer experience leaders must move beyond measurement to action. As expectations rise and ecosystems grow more complex, organizations struggle to connect insights, align teams, and prove CX value. Forrester frameworks help leaders operationalize customer obsession, unify data across journeys, and build programs that drive measurable business outcomes and long-term loyalty.
Accelerate Results With The Customer Experience Leader Success Cycle
The Forrester Customer Experience Leader Success Cycle provides a structured approach to measuring, governing, and improving customer experience. It helps leaders turn insights into action, align stakeholders around shared priorities, and demonstrate business impact. By establishing a repeatable process for continuous improvement, organizations can drive stronger and more consistent CX outcomes.
Turn Total Experience Into A Strategic Growth Lever
Forrester’s total experience research helps leaders understand how brand, customer, and employee experience work together to drive business performance. By identifying where experiences reinforce or undermine one another, organizations can improve loyalty, strengthen trust, align investments, and unlock growth.
Questions We Answer
CX Leader Questions That Forrester Helps Answer
Forrester helps customer experience leaders connect CX initiatives to measurable business outcomes by linking customer perceptions, behaviors, and operational performance to revenue growth, retention, and cost savings. Our research, frameworks, and tools enable leaders to quantify impact, build stronger business cases, prioritize investments, and gain executive confidence in CX as a driver of business value.
Forrester helps leaders evolve from score-keeping to insights-driven decision-making by integrating survey feedback with behavioral, operational, and journey data. Our guidance enables organizations to identify root causes, uncover opportunities for improvement, and prioritize actions that have the greatest impact on customer outcomes, employee performance, and business results across the customer lifecycle.
Forrester works with organizations to help establish clear ownership, governance, and accountability for customer experience outcomes. By aligning priorities, metrics, and decision-making across functions, leaders can break down silos, foster collaboration, and embed customer obsession throughout the organization, creating a more consistent and effective approach to delivering customer value.
CX Scores Are Up. Why Isn’t Growth? Bridge The Brand-CX Gap.
Stop guessing. This guide shows whether acquisition or retention is holding you back and where brand promise and CX delivery break down — so you can prioritize the right fixes.
Forrester Decisions for Customer Experience
Forrester Decisions for Customer Experience provides a structured approach to improving CX performance. It combines research, tools, and expert guidance to help leaders measure what matters, act on insights, and scale customer-centric practices across the organization.
What’s Included In This Service
Forrester Decisions services are uniquely built to give you strategic insights for your role as a business leader in your organization and help you deliver on your functional role as a division or department leader. Here’s what’s inside:
Insights
Shape strategy, guide transformational change, and stay ahead of the curve with leading research and insights.
- Customer obsession research
- Customer insights
- Trends and predictions
- Market forecasts
- Industry highlights
- Planning guides
- Technology and service provider landscapes
- Forrester Wave™ evaluations
Tools
Empower your team to conquer your priorities with proven strategic models and plug-and-play templates.
- KPIs and peer benchmarks
- Assessments
- Strategic models and frameworks
- Execution tools and templates
- Forrester Wave™ evaluations for your function
- Certification courses
Guidance
Accelerate progress and de-risk decisions with expert advice and hands-on support tailored to you and your team.
- Guidance sessions
- Peer discussions
- Event attendance
- Client webinars
- Dedicated relationship management
Forrester AI Where You Work
Powered by generative AI, Forrester AI helps clients make progress on their top initiatives faster, with trusted answers from Forrester research. Get AI-powered insights and advice from Forrester directly in the tools you use every day.
Support For Customer Experience Leaders And Their Teams
Empower your entire CX organization with role-specific guidance, tools, and insights that help teams align, execute, and deliver better customer outcomes at scale.
Executive
Leverage support from a trusted partner and former executive who understands your challenges and supports your strategic agenda every step of the way. Availability may vary by geographic region.
Leader
Procure deep expertise across your functional discipline through expert-led guidance sessions that help you apply unique research, tools, and data to your specific needs.
Team
Develop a common language and toolset to strengthen your team’s expertise and skills with access to relevant certification courses and insights.
AI Access
Equip everyone in your organization to get trusted advice fast through AI in a flexible self-service model.
Key Benefits For Customer Experience Leaders
Customer experience leaders need to demonstrate value, drive action, and scale impact across the organization.
- Prove CX value through measurable business outcomes.
- Turn customer insights into prioritized action.
- Align teams around customer-centric goals.
- Optimize end-to-end customer journeys.
- Scale customer obsession across the enterprise.
Starting Your Forrester Journey
From day one, your Forrester partnership is focused on helping you move faster on your most important initiatives. Together, we’ll turn your priorities into a clear, actionable plan for achieving your goals.
- Align on priorities and outcomes
Start with a structured kickoff to clarify your top initiatives and define success. - Activate insights and expertise
Work with a Forrester research leader to translate your top initiatives into an action plan. - Drive progress and prove value
Stay on track with ongoing guidance and support that advance initiatives and show impact over time.
What Our Clients Are Saying
How Best Egg Redefined Its CX Strategy
Discover how Best Egg elevated its CX game and made customer experience a shared focus throughout the company.
Build A Customer-First Culture, Step By Step
How do you infuse customer centricity into a company’s culture? Having a playbook helps. Learn how Forrester helps BC Hydro & Power Authority operationalize customer centricity.
Powering A Better Customer Experience
PSE&G was looking to enrich its customer experience. Hear how working with Forrester helped the company build a customer experience vision and strategy and infuse a customer mindset throughout the organization.
How Ardent Health Puts Patients Front And Center
Ardent Health strives to put its patients at the heart of all it does. Learn how Forrester is helping with that mission.
See more of our client success stories and learn about the ROI your peers have realized through Forrester Decisions.
Upcoming Events For CX Leaders
Complimentary Webinars
Beyond Journey Mapping: How To Embed Customer Context Into Business Decisions
Learn how to move beyond journey maps and use journey insights to drive better decisions, clearer investment priorities, and measurable impact.
From Experience Scores To Revenue Impact: A Total Experience Playbook For Growth
Agentic Commerce In 2026: What’s Real, What’s Coming, And What To Do Now
Explore Related Roles
Customer experience leaders work closely with B2C marketing and digital business leaders to create customer value, drive growth, and improve business performance. Forrester helps these teams align strategy, customer insights, technology, and execution to deliver measurable business outcomes.
B2C Marketing
For leaders responsible for engaging customers and driving demand, our research and guidance help sharpen customer insight, strengthen brand equity, improve campaign effectiveness, and ensure consistent, value-driven experiences across channels.
Digital Business
For leaders responsible for digital strategy, transformation, and innovation, our research and guidance support digital experience optimization, customer-centric growth, emerging technology adoption, and aligned business and technology investment that delivers measurable outcomes.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I connect CX metrics to business performance?
Connecting customer experience metrics to business performance requires integrating experience, operational, and financial data to uncover measurable outcomes. Forrester helps leaders identify relationships between customer perceptions and key results such as retention, revenue growth, customer lifetime value, and cost reduction. This enables organizations to prioritize investments, demonstrate impact, and build stronger executive support for CX initiatives.
What is the biggest barrier to CX success?
One of the most common barriers to CX success is a lack of alignment, ownership, and accountability across teams. When responsibilities are unclear and priorities differ, organizations struggle to turn insights into meaningful action. Forrester provides frameworks and guidance that help leaders establish governance, align stakeholders, and create shared goals that support consistent customer-focused decision-making.
How can I improve CX with limited budget?
Improving customer experience with limited resources requires focusing on the initiatives that deliver the greatest impact. Forrester helps leaders identify high-value opportunities by prioritizing key customer journeys, addressing root causes of friction, and aligning investments to business objectives. This approach enables organizations to make smarter decisions, maximize resources, and achieve measurable improvements without significantly increasing spending.
How do I move from touchpoint to journey measurement?
Moving from touchpoint measurement to journey measurement requires connecting data across channels and interactions to understand the complete customer experience. Forrester guides organizations in building journey-based measurement frameworks that reveal how experiences unfold over time. This broader view helps leaders identify obstacles, prioritize improvements, and better understand the factors driving customer and business outcomes.
What does customer obsession look like in practice?
Customer obsession is the ongoing alignment of strategy, culture, operations, and measurement around value to customers. Organizations that embrace customer obsession use customer insights to guide decisions, coordinate actions across functions, and improve experiences continuously. Forrester’s framework helps leaders embed customer-focused thinking throughout the business to drive loyalty, growth, and long-term competitive advantage.
