Forrester 2026 Total Experience Score: Top 10 Global Brands Ranked

What happened

Forrester has published its 2026 Global Total Experience Score rankings, naming the ten highest-performing brands worldwide, with the results unveiled at the firm's CX events. The Total Experience Score is Forrester's composite measure that combines customer experience quality with employee experience, reflecting the view that the two are inseparable drivers of brand performance.

The announcement was made as part of Forrester's ongoing CX events programme, where the analyst firm typically shares its annual benchmarking research alongside sessions on experience strategy, technology adoption and organisational design. Specific details on the composition of the top ten and the criteria weighting were presented at the event, positioning the ranking as an annual reference point for how leading brands are performing on integrated experience metrics.

Why it matters

Total Experience — the blending of customer, employee, user and multi-experience disciplines — has become one of the more closely watched frameworks in the industry because it forces organisations to stop treating CX and EX as separate workstreams. A ranking built on this combined score gives leaders a benchmark that reflects both the outward-facing quality of service and the internal conditions that produce it, rather than customer satisfaction scores viewed in isolation.

For experience and transformation leaders, the significance lies less in who tops the list and more in what the methodology signals: that boards and analysts are increasingly evaluating brands on whether good customer outcomes are being delivered sustainably, through engaged employees and well-designed operating models, rather than through isolated service recoveries or marketing polish.

The Renascence take

Rankings like this are useful shorthand, but they can also become a distraction if organisations chase the score rather than the behaviour the score is meant to capture.

The real value of a Total Experience metric isn't the league table — it's the discipline of measuring customer and employee experience as one system instead of two competing budgets. Most organisations that slip in these rankings haven't had a service failure; they've simply let employee experience erode quietly while customer-facing metrics held steady for a while longer. A customer-obsessed operator should use this ranking as a diagnostic prompt, not a scoreboard: ask whether your own CX gains are being funded by frontline strain that hasn't shown up in the numbers yet.