Forrester draws six leadership lessons from 2026 Total Experience honorees Home Depot and CareFirst
The common lesson Forrester draws from the two companies: a customer experience team cannot deliver total experience on its own. Experience depends on decisions made at every level of the organization about employees, technology, operations and measurement.
What's happening
The award's inaugural North American honorees, Home Depot and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, described how they put total experience principles into practice at Forrester's CX Forum events in June. According to Forrester, the two companies differ widely in industry and customer relationships, but their stories point to six lessons about turning experience into an organizational discipline. One concerns the friction employees face: CareFirst's customer service staff were switching among 8 to 20 screens to serve a member; working with its service and technology teams, the company reduced that friction by overhauling the service center's tools.
Whose desk it lands on
The executive responsible for customer experience. Are experience metrics only on their own team's scorecard, or also in the goals of product, operations and technology leaders?
Our view
The CX Brief's interpretation, not a claim made by the source.
The common thread in the six lessons Forrester compiled from what the two honorees said on stage is moving customer experience out of one team's project list and into the organization's decision-making habits. The most concrete step CareFirst described was not a customer-facing innovation but an overhaul of the tools that had agents switching between 8 and 20 screens for a member. This is often where a customer experience leader's most persuasive evidence lies: the friction employees face today foreshadows what customers will face tomorrow.
