Customer Experience Strategy Consulting Services

When Forrester first evaluated this market in 2020, it identified two things that separated the standout firms. The first was connecting the customer experience vision to the brand promise. The second was more revealing: backing that connection with data and analytics, because CX leaders frequently struggle to connect customer experience to business performance.

Read that carefully. A defining capability of the best CX consultancies was helping their clients prove that CX work was worth doing.

That is an unusual position for a professional services market. Most consulting sells a solution to a problem the client already believes in. Here, a meaningful part of the deliverable is the argument for the engagement itself, aimed at a finance function that has heard the CX case before and wants numbers.

Five years and four evaluations later, that problem has not gone away. What has changed is that some firms are now willing to put their fees behind the answer.

What the work covers

CX strategy consulting sits upstream of implementation. It is not the platform, the contact centre, or the redesigned application, though the same firms frequently sell those too.

The scope runs to customer research and marketplace analysis, journey mapping and experience design, CX vision and roadmap development, operating model and governance design, measurement frameworks, employee training and capability building, and the business case that funds all of it.

The criteria in the Q4 2024 evaluation give a picture of what Forrester scores: marketplace analysis, industry-specific and functional-area expertise, vision, innovation, partner ecosystem, talent strategy, and pricing flexibility and transparency, among others.

Two of those are worth noting because they are not about capability. Talent strategy and pricing transparency are operational properties of the firm, and their presence reflects a market where every serious provider can produce a competent journey map and the differences show up elsewhere.

Four editions, and who came and went

The vendor lists across the lineage tell a story about what CX was understood to mean at each point.

The Forrester Wave: Customer Experience Strategy Consulting Practices, Q4 2020 evaluated twelve practices against twenty eight criteria: Accenture, Bain & Company, BearingPoint, Capgemini, Deloitte, EPAM, IBM, KPMG, McKinsey & Company, North Highland, PwC, and Rightpoint.

The Q4 2022 edition expanded to fourteen against the same twenty eight criteria, adding AKQA, Boston Consulting Group, Concentrix, EY, and VMLY&R, while BearingPoint, North Highland, and Rightpoint dropped out.

Forrester also ran an Asia Pacific edition in Q4 2021 covering ten providers against twenty five criteria, which included Merkle and R/GA alongside the global names.

The Q4 2024 evaluation, published on 26 November 2024, covers twelve providers and renames the category from Practices to Services.

Two movements stand out. The mid-sized CX specialists present in 2020 were gone by 2022, absorbed or outcompeted by firms with broader transformation capability. And creative agencies entered in 2022, at the point when CX was widely understood as experience design, before the list contracted again.

The pattern suggests CX strategy consulting has been pulled steadily toward enterprise transformation and away from design. The firms that survived every edition are the ones that could carry a CX programme into operating model change rather than stopping at a set of journey maps.

Inside The Forrester Wave: Customer Experience Strategy Consulting Services, Q4 2024

The evaluation scored twelve providers across current offering, strategy, and customer feedback.

Capgemini placed as a Leader, taking the highest possible scores in vision, innovation, partner ecosystem, and talent strategy within the strategy category, and in seven current offering criteria including marketplace analysis and industry-specific and functional-area expertise. Reference customers credited its global presence, specifically in developing culturally sensitive research and messaging, and its adaptability in tailoring solutions.

KPMG placed as a Leader for the second consecutive evaluation, improving its position to second overall. Forrester noted significant financial investment in AI capability alongside broad industry expertise, and strength in upfront analytics and insight generation from marketplace analysis and customer research, which supports its downstream ability to create CX visions and business cases. Its roadmap development was assessed as advanced relative to the market on the strength of visualisation tools that surface journey issues and support decision-making. Reference customers cited deep industry expertise, the ability to translate best practice from other industries, and the level and speed of improvement in key performance indicators.

McKinsey placed as a Leader, described by Forrester as having doubled down on innovation and positioned for organisations that see executive-led enterprise-wide transformation as critical. Forrester cited investment in technical and data capability, including a generative AI tool providing fast analysis of contact centre data, and singled out its academy offering for employee training, with a curriculum deliverable in multiple modes and embeddable in a client's learning management system. Its approach was characterised as CX transformation grounded in business realities, with robust holistic assessments and business case development. Reference customers reported results aligned with or exceeding the expectations set at the outset.

Fees against outcomes

The most commercially significant detail in the current evaluation appears in KPMG's citation. Forrester notes that it stands out on pricing flexibility and transparency, with a dedicated team managing the pricing process and growth in performance-based contracts.

Performance-based contracting in CX consulting closes a loop this category has been circling for a decade.

If the differentiating capability is proving that CX work produces business results, then a firm confident in that proof has an obvious commercial move available: tie a portion of the fee to the result. The client's risk falls, the objection about unmeasurable benefits weakens, and the firm captures upside when it delivers.

That it is being noted as a differentiator rather than as standard practice tells you how rare it remains. Most engagements in this market are still priced on effort.

The same shift is visible in adjacent Forrester coverage. Its cybersecurity consulting research advises buyers to demand pricing linked to outcomes, and its AI consulting evaluation singled out one Leader specifically for putting a share of fees at risk. Three separate consulting categories, one direction of travel.

For a buyer the practical question is narrow and worth asking directly. What proportion of the fee is genuinely contingent, on which metrics, measured how, and by whom. A firm that has built the pricing capability will answer without difficulty. One that has not will explain why CX outcomes are too multi-causal to isolate, which is true and is also the argument for not being accountable.

AI has entered the delivery model

Both McKinsey's and KPMG's citations reference AI investment, and the McKinsey example is specific: a generative tool analysing contact centre data at depth and speed.

That is worth separating from AI as a client-facing recommendation. What is being described is AI in the consultancy's own delivery, doing the work that used to consume analyst weeks. Reading thousands of contact centre transcripts to find the recurring failure patterns is exactly the kind of task that was previously priced as a research workstream.

The same pattern appears across the consulting categories in this series. Cybersecurity consulting Leaders are cited for proprietary tooling that compresses compliance timelines. Application modernisation providers are assessed on emerging technology in client delivery.

Which produces the same unresolved question everywhere. If the diagnostic phase now takes days rather than weeks, does the fee reflect that, or does the productivity gain accrue entirely to the firm? Performance-based contracting is one answer to this. Silence is the other.

The measurement problem underneath

Return to the 2020 finding, because it explains why this category behaves as it does.

CX suffers from a structural attribution problem. Improvements to experience influence retention, share of wallet, referral, and cost to serve, but they do so alongside pricing, product, competitive moves, and economic conditions. Isolating the contribution of a journey redesign to a revenue number is genuinely hard, not merely inconvenient.

That difficulty produces three visible effects in this market.

Consultancies compete on benchmarking and analytical frameworks, because a credible external comparison partially substitutes for a causal measurement the client cannot produce internally.

Reference customers praise speed of KPI improvement, as KPMG's did, because directional movement in a metric is what is actually available. Whether the metric moved because of the engagement is a question everyone politely leaves alone.

And CX programmes remain vulnerable in budget cycles, which is why executive sponsorship features so heavily in how these firms position. McKinsey's fit for organisations treating executive-led transformation as critical is a description of the only condition under which CX work reliably survives.

None of which means CX investment does not pay. The evidence that experience quality correlates with commercial performance is substantial. It means the causal link in any specific programme is difficult to establish, and a consulting market has grown up partly to supply the confidence that the data cannot.

That is the honest reading of a category where proof is the hardest deliverable, and it explains why the firms now offering to price against outcomes are making a more interesting claim than the ones offering a better methodology.

Forrester does not endorse any provider named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.