Only 13% of companies are genuinely CX-mature. The rest believe they are better than they are.

87% of companies believe they are well on their way with customer experience. Only 13% can actually document it. That is one of the findings from our new CX Maturity Study 2026, based on responses from 203 CX leaders in 20 countries. When you measure across all the disciplines customer experience requires, only a small minority are strong on every parameter.
This is not a criticism of the level of ambition. Every company in the study has already put customer experience on the agenda, allocated resources and launched initiatives. The problem lies elsewhere: in the distance between working on customer experience and actually being good at it.

How the self-deception is revealed

The maturity index is built on six dimensions: strategy, measurement, systematic improvement, management ownership, management’s support for employees, and documentation of impact. A company only counts as “highly mature” if it scores strongly on all six areas at the same time. There is no averaging where strength in one area can offset weakness in another.
The model reflects how customers actually experience a company: not as an average of all its efforts, but through the weakest link in the chain. An award-winning webshop where the parcel never arrives on time. A welcoming customer service team that cannot solve the problem. A sharp strategy that never reaches the employee the customer actually meets. Every weak link drags the whole experience down. That is precisely why only 13% pass the test.

Even the conservative figure is still a self-assessment

The maturity index in this study is conservative, but it is still a self-assessment. All 203 responses come from CX leaders assessing their own company. We did not ask their customers. This is a built-in limitation of any study that measures from the inside: it captures how systematically a company perceives itself to be working with customer experience – not how customers actually experience it. That picture is usually more critical.

Medallias 2026 State of Customer Experience Report compares exactly these two perspectives directly: 66% of CX employees believe their company’s customer experience has improved over the past year. Only 17% of consumers agree. A gap of 49 percentage points between what the organisation believes and what customers experience.

Applied to our study’s figures, the implication is uncomfortable. If even a rigorous measurement across six dimensions still only captures the company’s own perspective, then 13% is probably the most optimistic version of the truth. If customers themselves were asked instead, there is good reason to believe the proportion of genuinely mature companies would be even lower – not higher. The 13% categorised as “highly mature” do not necessarily have the best customer experience in the customer’s eyes. They are simply the ones who have come closest to closing the gap between their self-image and reality.

The comfortable middle is the most dangerous zone

The distribution is thought-provoking: 33% of companies have low maturity, 54% sit in a broad middle group, and only 13% are genuinely mature. It is not the bottom that should worry a management team most – it is the middle. Companies in the middle are experiencing progress: 32% have already implemented a structured effort, 43% are in progress, and as many as 75% are continuously gathering customer insights. There is a strategy in place, it is measured, and customer experience is a fixed item on management meeting agendas.

But turn the figure around. If 32% have a structured effort, that means 68% have not yet reached the finish line – so almost 7 out of 10 companies still have not embedded customer experience as a fixed part of how they work. And this applies to a segment that has already prioritised customer experience, appointed a CX leader and allocated resources to the work. One concrete symptom of this imbalance is how companies follow up on complaints.

It is not ambition that is lacking. It is the ability to make strategy, measurement, improvement, management and documentation come together at the same time. And that ability is determined in the management team, not in the CX function.

The complaint is an overlooked goldmine in the study

Only 34 % of companies consistently follow up after a complaint – precisely where the most influenceable customers are found, and where the most valuable insights lie. This is an expensive priority to overlook, because a customer who complains has already done a large part of the work for you.

The vast majority of dissatisfied customers, after all, never say anything. They simply disappear quietly: cancel their subscription, switch to a competitor, or at the very least stop recommending you to other customers. The company never finds out why. The customer who actually complains is therefore an exception: someone who has taken the time to tell you exactly where something went wrong, instead of simply leaving. Letting the enquiry end as a single resolved case, with no systematic follow-up, means discarding some of the cheapest and most precise customer data a company can access.

There is also another, often overlooked benefit of consistent follow-up: a complaint that is handled well can make the customer more loyal than if the problem had never arisen. In CX, this is known as the “service recovery paradox”. A good recovery shows the customer something a problem-free experience never can – namely, how the company actually responds when something goes wrong. Without systematic follow-up, that opportunity is lost every single time a complaint lands and is never followed through.

Complaints also reveal something no single customer survey can: where the systemic weak links in the organisation lie. Ten identical complaints across different customers form a pattern, and often the earliest and cheapest warning of a problem that would otherwise only become visible months later. Consistent complaint follow-up is therefore close to a free, early-warning system that most companies in the study actually have access to, but which only just over one in three uses systematically. And as mentioned earlier, complaint follow-up follows the same pattern as the rest of the maturity index: it is markedly more common among mature companies than among the least mature. Yet another example of how it is the many small, consistent habits that together determine whether a company reaches the 13% that are genuinely mature.

What sets the 13% apart from the rest

The difference between the mature companies and the rest is unmistakable. Among companies with high maturity, 72% have already implemented a structured effort, compared with 34% in the middle group and only 12% among the least mature. The same pattern applies to belief in the future: 56% of the mature companies see customer experience as crucial to the company’s future, compared with 23% in the middle and only 15% at the bottom.

So the mature companies are not only better equipped today – they also believe most strongly in customer experience going forward. This is a self-reinforcing dynamic: they have seen that the effort works and therefore keep investing, while the less mature companies risk falling further behind. For a management team, this is an important realisation: the hard part is not getting started – most companies have already done that. The hard part is reaching the finish line.

Forrester’s “CX Predictions 2026” points out, among other things, that “budget cuts will force 15% of CX teams into a death spiral”. Yet another consequence of management’s lack of belief in the commercial value of CX work.

Documentation is the real dividing line

One of the clearest and most significant patterns in the entire dataset concerns documentation. Among the least mature companies, as many as 75% never calculate the financial impact of their CX work. In the broad middle group, the figure is 41%, and among the most mature, only 16%. In other words: the further along a company is, the more consistently it attaches financial figures and impact to its work.

This is an important nuance in understanding maturity as a concept: documentation is not simply a consequence of already being mature. It is one of the disciplines that actively creates maturity. Without documentation, the investment cannot be justified. Without investment, the effort becomes half-hearted. And a half-hearted effort rarely delivers the results that could have documented the value in the first place. It is a vicious circle. It hits customer experience harder than most other investments, precisely because it is so easy to cut when budgets need to be tightened.

Why the middle is dangerous right now

The timing makes this more urgent than just an organisational exercise. 24% of CX leaders are already experiencing a moderately negative impact from the global economic situation. A further 9% are experiencing a significant negative impact. Only 17% find that economic pressure is actually driving more investment in customer experience. When something is important in words but not embedded in governance, it is typically among the first things to give way when hard prioritising is required.

This is precisely where the difference between the mature companies and the rest becomes visible. The mature companies have made customer experience part of how they actually run the business – not just something they hope works. The large middle group therefore risks a double loss in a tougher period: momentum, and the investment already made in strategy and measurement that was never embedded deeply enough to survive a round of cutbacks.

The question for management

The point is not to chase a perfect score on a maturity index. The point is to recognise where the organisation actually stands – not where you believe it stands. Most companies will recognise themselves in the broad middle field. That is precisely where it becomes dangerous, because the middle looks like progress at first glance.

The real question, therefore, is not whether your company “works with” customer experience. Most do. The question is whether you can document that strategy, measurement, improvement, management ownership and employee support come together at the same time – or whether you, like 87% of the market, are strong in most areas and weak in at least one place that drags the entire customer experience down.