Republishing here the latest edition of my monthly newsletter on LinkedIn (The Punk CX Dispatch – Insights from the frontlines for those ready to smash the status quo and create experiences people actually love.)

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Are You Seeing Your Customer Experience Through Rose-Tinted Glasses?

Five9 recently published its 2026 Business Leaders CX Report, which captured the views of 3,000 consumers and 600 business decision-makers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in April of this year on the state of artificial intelligence (AI) in customer experience (CX).

While the report produced lots of interesting findings, the standout one for me was that 96% of business decision-makers say their AI-to-human handoffs preserve context.

However, when they asked customers for their opinions on this matter, 35% said they often or always have to repeat themselves, and 48% reported that they sometimes have to repeat themselves when they are handed over to a human agent after interacting with a brand’s AI agent. That adds up to 83% of customers disagreeing with what business decision-makers are saying.

That’s a significant performance and perceptual gap, particularly when you consider all the advancements we have witnessed in data, analytics, technology and AI in recent years.

However, perception gaps in the service and experience domain are not new.

For example, in 2005, Bain & Company found that 80% of companies they surveyed believed they delivered superior customer experience, while only 8% of their customers agreed.

Again in 2005, Bob Thompson of CustomerThinkconducted a study for RightNow Technologies (acquired by Oracle in 2011) called The Loyalty Connection: Secrets To Customer Retention And Increased Profits, which looked at the reasons customers stopped using a product or service and compared those with the perceptions of senior business leaders about why they believed customers stopped using a product or service.

Thompson’s research found that when customers were asked about why they had stopped using a product or service:

• 74% replied that customer service was the major issue;
• 32% stated that it was due to a quality issue;
• 25% cited a pricing issue; and
• 14% said that it was related to functionality.

However, when they asked senior business leaders why they thought customers stopped using a product or service:

• 49% replied that price was the major issue;
• 36% stated that a customer’s needs had changed; and
• Only 22% of executives believed that their organisation’s customer service was at fault.

Moreover, in 2022, research from Acquia found that only 10% of customers strongly agreed that most brands meet their expectations and delivered a “good experience.” Yet, according to the same research, 82% of marketers believe they meet customer expectations with regard to customer experience.

These pieces of research show that these perceptual gaps have existed and persisted for years.

So, what’s going on?

Why do these perceptual gaps persist?

Is it that brands always overestimate their performance?

Is it that overestimation is just a theme amongst leaders?

Personally, I have lots of different views on why this happens, ranging from brands and leaders paying lip service to customer centricity/engagement/obsession, to leaders being too distant from the frontline and their customers, to not truly understanding the technology they are using, to believing their own hype.

However, believing something works or simply is is not the same as it working in practice.

Note: I’d welcome any answers, thoughts or opinions on this matter via a comment, a DM or even on a postcard 🤪

Whatever the answer, the reality is that gaps do exist.

The good news? They can be reduced.

The bad news? Reducing the gap takes time, hard work, emotional labour, humility, persistence and commitment.

So, for all of you leaders out there who aren’t paying the aforementioned lip service, want to do and deliver better but struggle with the gap.

Get amongst your customers.

They won’t bite. Trust me.

Investigate the experience your customers actually have. Don’t outsource it. Do it yourself. Get stuck in.

It is work that is worth doing.

Avoiding it runs the risk that these perception gaps persist and they hinder many of your future efforts to improve customer relations, engagement, service and the overall customer experience.

Time to take off the rose-tinted glasses?

One thing before you go…

Don’t forget to check out last month’s episodes of the Punk CX podcast:

• The NiCE World London Takeover of the Punk CX Podcast Part Two featuring chats I had with Taz Chowdhury, Consultant and former Strategic Delivery Lead, Birmingham City Council and Oru Mohiuddin, Research Director, IDC, while at NiCE World London in July.
• Start with Strategy, Iterate Like a Band – Interview with Craig Crisler of SupportNinja
• Using generative agent simulations to drive better experience outcomes in healthcare – Interview with Sri Narasimhan of CVS Health
• Why digital accessibility is no longer optional in an AI-first world – Interview with Jeff Coyle of Siteimprove

See you next month 🙂

Image credit: Photo by Devon Janse van Rensburg on Unsplash