Forrester: Being good doesn't keep customers loyal; being better than rivals at what they care about does
Forrester shows this with data from a large bank in its 2025 benchmarking study: easy login, only fourth on customers' list of priorities, still needs improvement because the bank trails its competitors there.
What's happening
According to Forrester, many customer experience leaders risk investing in work that does not earn loyalty. What gets missed in deciding what to improve first is that customers don't stay loyal because you are good; they stay loyal when you are better than your competitors. At the bank studied, giving customers the information they need is an urgent priority: the issue is quite important, and the gap between the bank and its competitors is large. Judged only by the familiar chart that plots importance against the bank's own performance, neither this issue nor easy login would have seemed to call for urgent investment.
Whose desk it lands on
The executive responsible for customer experience. For every item on next year's improvement list, do we know whether our competitor is ahead of us or behind us at that step?
Our view
The CX Brief's interpretation, not a claim made by the source.
The real distinction Forrester draws from a single bank's data is that your weak spots are not the same as the areas where you lose customers to rivals. Easy login, only fourth on customers' list of priorities, did not look urgent on the familiar chart; it needs improvement because the bank trails its competitors at this step. A customer survey that doesn't ask a single question about rival brands steers the budget toward the organization's own weaknesses, while the difference that determines whether a customer stays or leaves shows up in the comparison with rivals.
