Retail's Total Experience Score: What Forrester's Latest Research Tells Us About the State of US Retail
The retail industry has always been defined by its relationship with customers. From the layout of a store floor to the speed of a checkout process, every touchpoint shapes how a shopper feels about a brand — and ultimately whether they return. Yet despite years of investment in customer experience technology, loyalty programs, and omnichannel infrastructure, a striking new report from Forrester Research suggests that most major US retailers still have a long way to go.
Forrester's Total Experience Score — a comprehensive framework designed to measure how well brands win, serve, and retain customers — paints a sobering but instructive picture of where the industry stands today. For brands willing to pay close attention, the data offers both a warning and a roadmap.
What Is Forrester's Total Experience Score?
Before diving into the numbers, it helps to understand what the Total Experience Score actually measures. Unlike traditional customer satisfaction surveys that focus narrowly on a single interaction, Forrester's Total Experience framework takes a holistic view of the relationship between a brand and its customers. It evaluates every dimension of the customer journey — from discovery and consideration through to purchase, post-purchase support, and long-term loyalty.
The score is built on the premise that customer experience is not a single department's responsibility. It is the cumulative result of decisions made across marketing, operations, technology, merchandising, and customer service. A brand that excels in one area but underperforms in another will see that imbalance reflected in its Total Experience Score.
For its most recent assessment, Forrester evaluated 41 major US retailers — a broad sample that spans grocery, apparel, home goods, electronics, and general merchandise categories. Each retailer was scored on a 100-point scale, with higher scores indicating stronger overall performance across all experience dimensions.
The Headline Number: 59.1 Out of 100
The average Total Experience Score across all 41 retailers assessed was 59.1 out of 100. To put that bluntly: the typical major US retailer is delivering a below-average total experience to its customers. In a landscape where consumer expectations are shaped by the very best digital and in-store experiences available — not just within retail, but across every industry — a score hovering just above the midpoint represents a significant vulnerability.
This figure should prompt serious reflection among retail executives. Customers today move fluidly between online and offline channels. They compare prices in real time, read peer reviews before making decisions, and expect seamless service whether they are shopping via a mobile app, a website, or a physical store. A score of 59.1 suggests that, for the most part, the industry has not yet cracked the code on delivering experiences that feel consistently excellent across all of these touchpoints simultaneously.
The Bright Spot: Measurable Year-Over-Year Improvement
Despite the modest absolute score, Forrester's research does contain genuine encouragement. Retail as a sector improved its average Total Experience Score by a statistically significant 0.4 points compared to the prior year. While that may sound incremental on paper, it is meaningful in the context of large-scale consumer research. Statistically significant improvements in broad industry averages are difficult to achieve and indicate a real, directional shift in how retailers are serving their customers.
This upward movement suggests that investments retailers have been making in areas like personalization, fulfillment speed, digital accessibility, and customer support capabilities are beginning to yield measurable returns. The challenge, of course, is that 0.4 points of improvement on a 100-point scale still leaves enormous room for growth — and the brands that are improving fastest are widening the gap between themselves and those that are standing still.
What Separates the Leaders from the Laggards?
While Forrester's research highlights the overall average, the more strategically useful insight lies in understanding what the top-performing retailers are doing differently. Based on the Total Experience framework and broader patterns in retail customer experience research, several key differentiators tend to emerge among brands that score significantly above average.
- Consistency across channels: High-scoring retailers do not treat digital and physical as separate businesses. They invest in ensuring that a customer's experience feels coherent whether they are browsing online at midnight or speaking with an associate in a store on a Saturday afternoon.
- Proactive communication: Leading brands keep customers informed at every stage of the journey — before, during, and after a purchase — reducing anxiety and building trust through transparency.
- Personalization that feels relevant, not intrusive: The best retailers use data intelligently to surface recommendations and offers that genuinely match individual customers' preferences, rather than bombarding them with generic promotions.
- Frictionless problem resolution: When something goes wrong — and in retail, something always eventually goes wrong — top performers make it easy for customers to get help quickly and without unnecessary effort.
- Employee experience as a foundation: Retailers with strong Total Experience Scores often invest as heavily in their frontline employees as they do in their customer-facing technology, recognizing that engaged, well-trained staff are a critical competitive advantage.
The Stakes for Retail Brands Have Never Been Higher
The implications of Forrester's findings extend well beyond bragging rights on an industry scorecard. Research consistently demonstrates that customer experience is one of the most powerful drivers of loyalty, share of wallet, and word-of-mouth advocacy. Retailers that deliver superior total experiences retain customers longer, attract new ones more efficiently, and are better positioned to withstand competitive pressure from e-commerce disruptors and private-label alternatives.
Conversely, retailers that allow experience gaps to persist — whether in checkout friction, inconsistent service, or poor digital usability — face an accelerating erosion of customer confidence. In a market where switching costs are low and alternatives are abundant, a mediocre experience is increasingly a reason to leave and not come back.
What Retail Leaders Should Do Next
For retail executives and experience strategists reviewing Forrester's findings, the path forward requires both ambition and discipline. Broad averages can be misleading — what matters most is understanding where your brand specifically sits on the Total Experience spectrum and which dimensions of the customer journey are creating the most friction or disappointment.
Investing in robust voice-of-customer programs, journey mapping exercises, and cross-functional experience governance structures can help retailers move beyond reactive improvements and toward a more systematic approach to building experiences that genuinely differentiate. The brands that treat Total Experience not as a metric to optimize but as a genuine organizational philosophy will be the ones that post scores — and results — that are meaningfully above the industry average.
Forrester's data makes one thing clear: the gap between good and great in retail customer experience remains wide open. For brands willing to close it, the opportunity has never been more compelling.