At a Glance

  • According to Forrester research, USAA offers the best overall experience among all U.S. brands in 2026. The research and consulting firm released its 2026 Global Overall Experience Rankings earlier this month, evaluating more than 400 brands based on over 350,000 consumer perception data points.
  • In the retail sector, Chewy, Home Depot, and Costco provide the best overall experiences.
  • Among U.S. brands analyzed by Forrester, slightly more than half saw their overall experience scores rise, while 4% declined. Globally, 41% of brands improved their scores, with only 3% seeing declines.

Deep Insights

Forrester believes that a company's overall experience encompasses not just brand promise, experiences for prospective customers, or experiences for existing customers, but rather the sum of all these elements.

Menon Billingsley, a customer experience solutions strategist at Qualtrics, told CX Dive that viewing experience from this perspective is "absolutely the right approach."

Forrester's overall experience metric measures a company's ability to acquire new customers, deliver experiences, and maintain loyalty.

"It's a virtuous cycle, and these elements don't exist in isolation," Billingsley said. "However, from an organizational structure standpoint, we still allocate budgets by function—brand has a budget, customer experience has a budget, HR has a budget, and people operations teams may not even know our customer experience teams."

Chewy stands out particularly, with a customer score of 78.6 (out of 100) and a non-customer score of just 52.5, averaging to an overall experience score of 65.5. The brand has focused on the reliability of its Autoship subscription service, which accounted for 84% of net sales in the most recent quarter.

Billingsley emphasized that consistency is crucial.

"These brands have continuity and build trust," Billingsley said.

Although Chewy is an online retailer, Home Depot offers an omnichannel experience, and Costco focuses primarily on in-store experiences, they all serve customers in predictable ways.

"They may not have similar delivery models or the same journey offerings, but the key is that every time I go to Costco, I know what to expect," Billingsley said. "Every time I go on Chewy, I know you remember what I ordered for my pet, I know it will arrive on time, and my pet won't go hungry because the dog food is late."

Billingsley noted that as consumer sentiment declines and technological changes disrupt the status quo, brands that deliver consistent experiences aligned with expectations are more likely to succeed.