Dive Brief:
- CX quality dropped for the third year in a row, hitting a new low, according to Forrester’s 2024 U.S. customer experience index. Forrester analyzed over 98,000 customers' perceptions of more than 200 brands across 13 industries, basing its analysis on customers’ perceptions of brands’ effectiveness, ease and emotion.
- Nearly 2 in 5 brands saw their CX quality significantly decline. The average score dropped 3.9 points on a 100 point scale, more than the record 3.6 point decline in 2023.
- Declines were seen across every industry, except airlines. The airline industry gained 2 points on average.
Dive Insight:
The decline in CX quality has no single culprit, according to Forrester.
The analyst firm noted that the customers’ perceptions of ease and effectiveness of their experiences with brands declined, consumer sentiment nationwide declined, and technological innovations may have missed customers’ expectations.
“There's no one thing we can point to,” Pete Jacques, a principal analyst and author of the report, told CX Dive. “What we're seeing are a number of different trends, which unfortunately makes it a little bit more challenging for companies.”
“Ease and effectiveness scores went down a bit more than emotion,” Jacques said, “which is telling us, in general, customers are finding it a little more difficult to get done what they need.”
Brands also haven’t met customers’ expectations for self-service technology, especially for conversational AI chatbots.
“Expectations were raised a lot around gen AI,” Jacques said. “It feeds back up to this general sense of here's all these technological advances, but it's not making my experience really any better or any easier.”
Middle class consumers are driving the drop in quality scores, Jacques said. Consumers are generally worried about the economy as they spend more but don’t see any added value.
