About 31% of American adults plan on setting a New Year’s resolution, according to a recent YouGov poll. As expected, most involve self-improvement — top picks include exercising more, being happier, and eating better. If your 2026 resolutions include refining your customer experience (CX) improvement plan, the recent release of Forrester’s Global Net Promoter Score Rankings, 2025, can help.
NPS Continues To Decline In Many Industries Globally
To compile the 2025 Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) rankings, we surveyed more than 275,000 customers across 478 brands, 13 industries, and 13 countries. We asked them about their likelihood to recommend brands they interacted with in the past 12 months as a measure of customer loyalty. The results showed that NPS fell for 20 out of 39 industry-country combinations around the world that we studied in both 2024 and 2025, rose in only three, and remained level in the remaining 16.
Regional analysis revealed:
- In North America, declines in about a quarter of brands hurt most industry averages.
- In Europe, brand losses and widespread stagnation hampered industry performance.
- In APAC, brand-level drops sent some industries’ scores lower.
Make Better CX Your New Year’s Resolution
Whether your brand has slipped, maintained level performance, or is one of the few that significantly improved, you can benefit from a deeper understanding of the 2025 results. Make a resolution to take full advantage of Forrester’s support to help you achieve your CX goals. As a Forrester client, you can:
- Dig deeper to understand the drivers of customer intent. Use Forrester’s research to understand key drivers of NPS and customer sentiment on other important variables such as trust, brand value, and CX quality — factors that comprise the Total Experience Score. Contact your account team to request deep-dive analyses for your brand or industry.
- Broaden your analytic scope to build a more complete picture. Link information from more targeted studies, seek unsolicited and unstructured sources of customer feedback, and link to internal operational data. All of these provide additional perspectives on what happens as your customers engage with your brand. Don’t neglect broader factors that impact customer perceptions and what they value, including your organization’s culture, employee experience, and marketplace conditions.
- Benchmark appropriately. Even if you measure NPS internally, we don’t recommend comparing your scores directly to ours (or other third-party national benchmarks). It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, since survey methodologies and sampling differ. Instead of focusing on absolute scores, see if your company’s scores are moving in the same direction as your industry or key competitors. Are your scores improving at a faster rate? These answers will be more useful in guiding your planning.
- Call a friend. Forrester clients can schedule a guidance session with me to discuss scores from this report and the next steps for improving CX quality. You can also start with my earlier blog that discussed Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) results for 2025.
