Retail's Total Experience Score: Industry-Wide Gaps and Emerging Leaders
The retail industry has never been under more pressure to deliver seamless, satisfying customer experiences. Shoppers today expect personalization, frictionless checkout, responsive service, and consistent brand engagement whether they're browsing online or walking the aisles of a physical store. Yet despite years of investment in digital transformation and customer experience initiatives, a new Forrester report reveals that most major US retailers still have significant ground to cover. The findings are sobering — but they also highlight a path forward for brands that are willing to commit to meaningful change.
What Is the Total Experience Score?
Forrester's Total Experience Score is a comprehensive measurement framework designed to assess how effectively brands win and serve their customers across every touchpoint. Rather than focusing narrowly on a single metric like customer satisfaction or Net Promoter Score, the Total Experience Score takes a holistic view, evaluating the full spectrum of interactions a customer has with a retailer — from awareness and discovery through purchase, post-sale support, and long-term loyalty.
For the latest report, Forrester assessed 41 major US retailers, scoring each on a 100-point scale. The resulting data paints a nuanced picture of an industry that is moving in the right direction, but still falling well short of what today's consumers expect.
The Average Score: A Wake-Up Call for the Industry
The headline finding is difficult to ignore: the average Total Experience Score across all 41 retailers was just 59.1 out of 100. That's barely above the halfway mark on a scale designed to capture excellence in customer experience. For an industry that collectively spends billions of dollars annually on marketing, technology, and store design, a score in this range signals that the investment is not yet translating into the kind of differentiated, memorable customer experiences that drive lasting loyalty.
This average score underscores a fundamental challenge that many retailers face: the gap between what brands believe they are delivering and what customers actually feel. Internal metrics and customer surveys often tell a rosier story than third-party assessments like Forrester's, which incorporate behavioral data, customer perception research, and competitive benchmarking into a single unified view.
A Statistically Significant — If Incremental — Improvement
Not everything in the report is cause for concern. Compared to the prior year, the retail industry's average Total Experience Score increased by a statistically significant 0.4 points. While that figure might seem small in isolation, the statistical significance of the gain matters. It indicates that the improvement is not noise or random fluctuation — it reflects a genuine, measurable shift in how retailers are performing for their customers.
This incremental progress is an encouraging signal that the industry's collective investments in customer experience are beginning to bear fruit. Retailers that have doubled down on omnichannel integration, loyalty programs, associate training, and digital convenience are slowly moving the needle. The challenge is that the pace of improvement needs to accelerate if the industry wants to close the gap between current performance and customer expectations.
Select Brands Are Pulling Ahead
While the average tells one story, the distribution of scores across the 41 assessed retailers tells another. Certain brands are achieving notably higher Total Experience Scores than their peers, demonstrating that excellence in retail CX is attainable — it simply requires the right strategy, culture, and execution.
The retailers that tend to outperform share several common characteristics:
- Consistent omnichannel experiences: High-scoring retailers make it easy for customers to move fluidly between digital and physical channels without losing context, preferences, or purchase history.
- Empowered and knowledgeable associates: Brands that invest in frontline employee training and empowerment consistently earn higher marks for in-store experience, because well-supported employees deliver better service.
- Transparent and reliable fulfillment: Customers increasingly judge retailers on how accurately and quickly their orders are fulfilled, and top performers set clear expectations and consistently meet them.
- Personalization that feels genuine: Leading brands use data to make relevant product recommendations and communications without crossing into territory that feels intrusive or surveillance-like.
- Proactive problem resolution: Rather than waiting for customers to complain, the best-performing retailers anticipate issues and resolve them before they damage the relationship.
Why Total Experience Matters More Than Ever
The concept of Total Experience — which encompasses customer experience, employee experience, and user experience together — is gaining traction among forward-thinking retail leaders because it recognizes a simple truth: the experiences customers have are inseparable from the experiences employees have. When associates feel supported, informed, and empowered, that energy flows directly into customer interactions. Retailers that invest in only one side of this equation consistently underperform those that take an integrated approach.
Moreover, in a retail environment shaped by persistent inflation sensitivity, growing competition from marketplace giants, and rapidly shifting consumer expectations around sustainability and ethics, the ability to deliver a consistently excellent total experience is becoming one of the most durable competitive advantages available to brands.
What Retailers Should Do Next
For retail leaders looking to move their own Total Experience Score in the right direction, the Forrester data offers a clear mandate. Start by auditing the full customer journey with honest, third-party-style rigor rather than relying solely on internal sentiment metrics. Identify the moments where friction, inconsistency, or unmet expectations are eroding trust. Then prioritize fixes that compound — improvements to foundational processes like fulfillment accuracy and associate responsiveness tend to lift scores across multiple experience dimensions simultaneously.
Equally important is the organizational work of aligning customer experience goals with employee experience investments. Retailers that treat these as separate workstreams will continue to underperform relative to those that recognize the deep interdependence between the two.
The Bottom Line
Forrester's Total Experience Score assessment of 41 major US retailers delivers a clear verdict: the industry is improving, but the pace is slow and the average performance remains mediocre. A score of 59.1 out of 100 represents real opportunity — for brands that are willing to take the insights seriously and build the operational and cultural foundations that genuine customer experience excellence requires. The retailers pulling ahead today are showing the rest of the industry what is possible. The question is how quickly others will follow their lead.