Top 10 brands in customer experience
- H-E-B
- Edward Jones
- USAA
- Patagonia
- Costco Wholesale
- Chick-fil-A
- Navy Federal Credit Union
- Texas Roadhouse
- L.L. Bean
- In-N-Out Burger
Rewire your front office to capture value from AI
In the 2025-2026 Customer Experience Excellence report, a survey of 10,000+ US consumers shows how leading U.S. brands are capturing customer signals to orchestrate customer experience and help achieve measurable results.
To capture value from AI, you need to break down silos, modernize your data governance, and orchestrate your customer journeys. We can help.
Executive summary: The orchestrated customer experience challenge
- Top ranking US brands are transforming customer experience by capturing real-time Signal Moments—micro-cues that reveal intent, emotion, or need—across every touchpoint.
- Agentic AI can enable organizations to sense, interpret, and act on these signals instantly, orchestrating coordinated journeys across marketing, sales, and service.
- Brands that capture Signal Moments and agentic orchestration outperform on loyalty, personalization, and operational efficiency.
- KPMG helps clients activate Signal Moments, scale agentic AI, and build the data, governance, and operating models needed for front office transformation.
Key insights from US consumers
- 7.44 – The average customer experience score for US companies. Up slightly from prior year
- 52% of consumers are extremely or significantly impacted by cost of living and adjust purchasing behavior to minimize effects
- A plurality of customers are willing to pay for more premium experiences in some sectors – 43% in healthcare, 39% in financial services, and 39% in non-grocery retail
- Brands most often fail to meet customer expectations during product use (28%), during purchase (20%), and during support moments (18%). These are opportunities for brands to use Signal Moments to detect and enact corrective workflows
What leading brands are doing: Turning Signal Moments into action
Grocery stores use weather signals to anticipate demand and optimize inventory.
Asset management companies equip advisors with AI-powered prompts to help customers at moments of financial significance.
Banks are leveraging AI to detect the moments that matter and proactively offered tailored service bundles to support their customers.
In all these sectors, top brands have spent recent years working to capture new signals from their customers and use agentic AI to act on these Signal Moments across marketing, sales, and service.
Signal Moments: What they are and why they matter
Signal Moments are the micro-cues that reveal a customer’s intent, emotion, or need. When detected and interpreted in real time, Signal Moments allow organizations to anticipate needs, personalize responses, and act before friction escalates. Examples include:
- Life events: Moving, buying a car, retiring.
- Behavioral shifts: Sudden changes in spending, increased service usage, switching channels.
- Contextual triggers: Weather events, location signals, or ecosystem interactions.
Unlike traditional segmentation, Signal Moments are dynamic, personal, and immediate—enabling brands to shift from reactive service to proactive engagement. Agentic AI makes this scalable by continuously sensing across data sources, feedback, transactions, and employee inputs, stitching them together into actionable context.
Identifying Signal Moments
Signal Moments are detected by weaving together:
- Direct customer feedback (surveys, reviews, transcripts)
- Indirect feedback (social media, forums, ratings)
- Behavioral signals (clicks, browsing, abandoned carts, channel switching)
- Employee insights (service desk, branch, field teams)
AI ENABLEMENT
Agentic AI ingests and interprets thousands of data points, connecting silos and spotting patterns invisible to humans. It assembles a living model of customer state, triggering the right workflow—reassurance, outreach, problem resolution, or a tailored offer.
How agentic AI enables Signal Moments at scale
Traditional systems rely on static rules and models. Agentic AI senses, reasons, and acts in real time across a broad field of signals. It interprets intent, evaluates multiple data streams, and autonomously coordinates actions across marketing, sales, service, and operations—executing and adjusting as circumstances change.
Activating Signal Moments: Where to start, how to scale
Start with well-established, high-value use cases:
- Onboarding: Detect new accounts or purchases, provide guidance and reassurance.
- Re-engagement: Spot inactivity, trigger personalized outreach.
- Churn prevention: Identify risk signals, intervene before attrition.
HOW TO SCALE
Scale by piloting use cases, integrating across functions, and embedding into governance and culture. Invest in technology, talent, and governance to build maturity.
The six pillars of experience: How Signal Moments drive value
Integrity
Role in Signal Moments:
Detects trust moments
How agentic AI enables this:
Monitors data streams,
triggers resolution
Role in Signal Moments:
Detects trust moments
How agentic AI enables this:
Monitors data streams,
triggers resolution
Resolution
Role in Signal Moments:
Minimizes friction
How agentic AI enables this:
Proactive recommendations, coordinates agents
Role in Signal Moments:
Minimizes friction
How agentic AI enables this:
Proactive recommendations, coordinates agents
Expectations
Role in Signal Moments:
Senses gaps
How agentic AI enables this:
Predicts, notifies,
adjusts offers dynamically
Role in Signal Moments:
Senses gaps
How agentic AI enables this:
Predicts, notifies,
adjusts offers dynamically
Time & Effort
Role in Signal Moments:
Recognizes intent
How agentic AI enables this:
Bridges systems,
automates fulfillment
Role in Signal Moments:
Recognizes intent
How agentic AI enables this:
Bridges systems,
automates fulfillment
Personalization
Role in Signal Moments:
Captures preferences
How agentic AI enables this:
Learns from signals,
adapts content in real time
Role in Signal Moments:
Captures preferences
How agentic AI enables this:
Learns from signals,
adapts content in real time
Empathy
Role in Signal Moments:
Detects emotion
How agentic AI enables this:
Analyzes data, adapts responses
to emotional state
Role in Signal Moments:
Detects emotion
How agentic AI enables this:
Analyzes data, adapts responses
to emotional state
How to rewire your front office for the moments that matter
Signal Moments and agentic AI create a compounding value stream—improving productivity, efficiency, and resilience. Each signal captured can sharpen the ability to anticipate needs, enhance operations, and strengthen relationships. This flywheel effect supports sustained growth, operational agility, and new business models.
Impact on marketing, sales, and service
Marketing
Personalization and engagement at scale. Data-driven insights turn foresight into action
Sales
Smarter prioritization, higher conversion. Situational signals refine lead scoring and enable adaptive playbooks
Service
From reactive to proactive. Agentic AI detects emerging problems, enables predictive support, and turns resolution into growth
What holds teams back
Data fragmentation
Signals scattered across channels and systems
Operating model alignment
Siloed functions, lack of cross-functional governance
Technology orchestration
AI not embedded into journeys, lack of reusable agents
Don’t let these barriers hold you back
How KPMG can help
Our approach is built on proprietary customer experience (CX) assets, deep industry knowledge, and well-established frameworks for activating Signal Moments and agentic AI. We support your front office transformation by:
1
Interrogating journeys to identify Signal Moments
2
Launching use cases that capture value
3
Quantifying business impact
4
Scaling responsibly for long-term value
5
Helping your teams to focus on meaningful work
2025-26 Consumer Experience Excellence Report
Methodology
Each year, we survey more than 10,000 consumers to learn which companies they think provide outstanding customer experiences. We rank them according to their scores across the Six Pillars of Customer Experience. This study was conducted in June 2025 and had 292 brands across 11 sectors in the final result.
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Meet our team
Scott Lieberman
Principal, US Customer Advisory Leader, KPMG LLP
Jeff Mango
Managing Director, US Customer Experience Leader, KPMG LLP
Scott Lieberman
Principal, US Customer Advisory Leader, KPMG LLP
Jeff Mango
Managing Director, US Customer Experience Leader, KPMG LLP