December 04, 2025
KPMG’s Customer Experience Excellence Report Highlights Global CX Trends
KPMG has just published its 2025-26 report on customer experience excellence. It naturally focuses on the rise of agentic AI across the traditional areas of CX principles, based on over 80,000 interviews across 2,600+ brands.
The 46-page report, badged as “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI” (PDF) is a deep dive across retail, banking, health, public sector and utilities.
It leads with “Customer experience excellence is undergoing a profound transformation. No longer focused solely on optimizing individual touchpoints, leading organizations are now building Total Experience, the seamless integration of structured and unstructured customer data, cross-functional processes, ecosystem interactions, and underlying technology platforms into one intelligent, adaptive whole that delivers predictable, reliable, and measurable experiences.”
KPMG Notes CX Excellence on the Rise
The first highlight of the report is a rise in most European nations’ CEE metrics, with the UK leading the way (up 1.7%) and strong growth in Asia. Only the US, Italy and Turkiye (down 2.4%) seem to be struggling in boosting their scores.
Honourable mentions go to the UK’s Richer Sounds (TV and stereo retailer), Mexico’s Fiesta Americana (hotels) and France’s Puy du Fou (hotels) for the highest growth in CEE rating.
By sector, healthcare comes top of the ratings, with only telecoms, logistics, utilities and public sector below the average CEE score.
Agentic AI is Here to Orchestrate and Participate
The report digs into the use of agentic AI from a total experience context, where it will act as both orchestrator and participant.
- “As an orchestrator, it coordinates across functional teams, channels, and journeys, ensuring consistency and personalization
without the customer feeling the complexity behind the scenes. - As a participant, it directly interacts with customers, employees, or partners answering questions, recommending actions, or
completing transactions, while drawing on shared data and organizational knowledge.”
Agents are seen as a part of a wider CX power shift, from companies to consumers and their agents.
“Agentic AI is changing more than how organizations deliver experiences, it’s transforming the very nature of who (or what) they are selling and potentially delivering them to.
The balance of power is shifting decisively towards consumers, not just as informed decision-makers, but as AI-augmented entities. With the rise of personal AI agents, consumers are increasingly outsourcing decision-making, preference filtering, and even transactional interactions to intelligent systems that act on their behalf.”
Dive into the Case Studies
With a bedrock of analysis over the 16 years of reports, KPMG provides plenty of evolving market insight, and current case studies with the likes of UKCXA and EXA winner Octopus Energy leading the way in excellence.
“Agentic orchestration of home energy ecosystems Octopus’s Kraken platform uses AI agents to manage billing, forecast energy usage, and optimize appliance operation in real time. These agents interact with EVs, smart thermostats, and solar panels to deliver seamless, low-carbon experiences.”
Will agentic AI move the results by the time next year’s report comes around? We look forward to finding out. Until then, there’s plenty more in the research to digest.
