McKinsey has been recognized as a Leader, the highest designation possible, in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Experience Strategy Consulting Services, Q4 2024 report. Forrester evaluated 12 firms, assessing them on 27 criteria in three categories across current offering, strategy, and customer feedback. McKinsey also received the highest score on the “strategy” axis out of all the vendors evaluated.
In the two years since Forrester last evaluated the Customer Experience (CX) Strategy Consulting market, billions of dollars have gone into building AI. The report notes that “McKinsey’s CX practice doubled down on innovation since our last evaluation of this market, applying large financial and staffing resources to improve its innovation and supporting services capabilities.” Such investment has brought the quality of consulting in this segment to unprecedented levels. It adds that McKinsey’s “internal ecosystem now includes tools like its gen[erative] AI-fueled [automated virtual assistant] AVA, which provides deep and fast analysis of contact center data.”
What’s next in experience-led growth
Here’s how we’re continuing to lead in experience-led growth, a distinctive approach to achieving business value. We help organizations define their CX aspiration from the start and rally the entire organization toward customer-centricity in a sustained manner. Offerings include benchmarking and AI-enabled predictive analytics for designing—or redesigning—products, services, business models, or customer journeys; launching at scale; and conducting capability building programs for client organizations.
Beyond this strategy, however, the real differentiator lies in how McKinsey is using AI to enhance customer experience for clients. “AI is at the cornerstone of each of our three building blocks for unlocking growth: setting aspirations, agile change, and building capabilities,” says Oliver Ehrlich, a McKinsey partner. “AI in all its forms—agentic, creative, analytic—helps us transform experiences by deepening customer relationships, and at lower costs.” To help build client customer service capabilities, McKinsey Academy learning programs send personalized, automated nudges that are tailored specifically to clients’ unique roles. “The nature of nudges for frontline workers, such as truck delivery specialists, differs significantly from those designed for senior-level executives,” Oliver adds.
“By leveraging a suite of technology-enabled solutions and substantial investments in generative AI, our clients have unlocked new revenue streams and realized significant cost savings from their existing customer base,” says Alex Rodriguez, a McKinsey senior partner. In fact, 80 percent of the value creation achieved by the world’s most successful growth companies comes from their core businesses.
The future of customer experience is holistic, predictive, and proactive, and we are excited to be at the forefront of the latest innovations to keep delighting our clients as they delight their own.
In one example, McKinsey recently used AI to create new capabilities for a major airline company and a global payments system that completely revamped their respective businesses. “By working with the data science team, we were able to stitch together disparate groups of data to build an algorithm to better predict things, like flyer frequency,” Alex explains. The airline saw profitability across all hubs and regions, a rare achievement in the industry—with an 11 percent increase in revenue from its loyalty program.
“This is a massive shift in how companies get insights into the experience of their customers,” he says. “Whereas before AI, the challenge had been in being able to aggregate multiple data sets that sit in silos, now we can bring this all together to propose value-added solutions for clients.”
The Forrester report offers a guide to service providers in the CX strategy consulting market, an area that has experienced a “staggering” increase in financial investments in just the last two years, particularly for building out AI capabilities.
“As a professional services firm, we hold ourselves accountable to the financial performance of our clients,” says Nicolas Maechler, a McKinsey senior partner. “We seamlessly integrate CX across brand, product, service, and value to maximize its business impact.” He adds: “Many of our client CEOs are keen to distinguish their organizations through exceptional customer experience. The future of customer experience is holistic, predictive, and proactive, and we are excited to be at the forefront of the latest innovations to keep delighting our clients as they delight their own.”
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