Why Customers Compare You to Every Brand, Not Just Rivals

They're comparing you to the best digital experience they had this morning — regardless of what industry it came from.

In short: Customer expectations no longer travel within industry lines. A seamless banking app resets what someone expects from their insurer; a great delivery-tracking experience resets what they expect from a B2B supplier. Companies that keep benchmarking only against direct competitors are quietly falling behind a bar they can't even see moving. The fix isn't a bigger CX budget — it's a different way of watching the market and a faster way of responding to it.

Your Benchmark Just Got a Lot Bigger

A customer opens their banking app to move money between accounts in under ten seconds. An hour later, they're on hold with their health insurer, repeating their policy number for the third time. Nobody told them these two experiences should feel the same. They just do — and the gap is what they remember.

This is the pattern behind almost every CX complaint that starts with "why can't this just work like—": why can't switching energy providers be as easy as switching a streaming subscription, why can't a public-sector form take thirty seconds instead of thirty minutes, why can't a warranty claim move as fast as a parcel refund.

None of these comparisons are fair, exactly. A regulated insurer and a consumer banking app operate under completely different constraints. But customers don't grade on a curve for constraints. They grade on the experience itself — and increasingly, on an experience they picked up somewhere else entirely.

The Data Behind the Shift

This isn't a hunch. Accenture's 2016 "Expectations vs Experience" study, based on interviews with more than 700 CX decision-makers across 14 countries, found that over nine in ten companies were struggling to exceed digital customer expectations — and only a small fraction (7%) felt they were actually managing it, even though most believed they were ahead of their direct competitors. The gap wasn't between companies and their rivals. It was between companies and a moving target set somewhere else.

Salesforce's ongoing "State of the Connected Customer" research adds the mechanism: a large majority of customers say that one exceptional experience raises what they expect from every other company they deal with, and more than half have walked away from a brand after a competitor — often in a completely different category — set a new standard for what "good" feels like.

Put together, the two findings describe the same phenomenon from opposite sides: expectations rise somewhere else, and companies get penalized for not knowing it happened.

It's Not Just a Consumer Problem

B2B buyers carry the same instincts into work. A logistics manager who tracks a parcel to the minute on a delivery app will expect the same visibility from a freight partner managing a shipment worth a hundred times more. A finance team that self-serves an expense report through a slick SaaS tool will start asking why procurement approvals still take a week and three emails.

The professional-versus-personal split customers used to maintain in their heads is dissolving. They don't file "good software" under consumer and "acceptable friction" under work. They just notice when one is worse than the other.

Turning the Trend Into an Advantage

The organizations that get ahead of this don't try to out-CX every industry at once. They build four specific capabilities — the same four we walk through in more depth in our guide to CX transformation:

• ‍Governance — Redefine what "good" means at the leadership level. If your CX benchmarks only include direct competitors, your definition of success is capped by your industry's ceiling. Add two or three outside-industry reference points to every CX review, deliberately chosen for the behaviors you want customers to expect from you.‍
• Delivery — Shorten the distance between noticing a gap and testing a fix. Expectations set elsewhere don't wait for your next planning cycle, so the teams that keep up are the ones running small, fast pilots instead of waiting for a full redesign.‍
• Culture — Make "where else have you seen this done well?" a normal question in project kickoffs, not a novelty. Teams that are fluent in experiences outside their own category spot the gap before a customer has to point it out.

Competence — Build the muscle to prototype and validate quickly. Spotting a cross-industry expectation is only useful if the organization can test a response in weeks, not quarters.

Three Moves to Make This Quarter

You don't need a transformation program to start. Three things any CX or product team can do in the next few weeks:

1. Run a borrowed-benchmark audit. Pick your three most important customer journeys. For each one, ask: what's the best version of "this same moment" your customer has experienced anywhere — banking, retail, travel, food delivery — regardless of industry? Measure your journey against that, not against your closest competitor.
2. Add one outside-industry question to customer research. Alongside satisfaction and NPS questions, ask what other company's experience customers wish yours felt more like. The answers are usually specific, and usually surprising.
3. Pilot the fix in weeks, not quarters. Pick the smallest version of the gap you can close and test it with a limited group of real customers before committing to a full rebuild.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are "liquid expectations" in customer experience?
It's a term first used by Accenture Interactive to describe how customer expectations shift between industries — once someone has a great experience in one category (like banking or retail), they expect that same standard everywhere else, regardless of what business they're dealing with.

Why do customer expectations rise faster than most companies can respond?
Because the bar isn't set by direct competitors on a predictable release cycle — it's set by whichever company, in any industry, delivers the best version of a given moment (checkout, support, tracking, onboarding) first. That can happen at any time, from anywhere.

How do you benchmark customer experience across industries?
Start by mapping your key customer journeys to the underlying "moment" they represent (paying, tracking, getting help, onboarding), then identify the best version of that moment in any industry — not just your own — and measure your experience against it.

Is this only relevant to consumer (B2C) businesses?
No. B2B buyers bring the same expectations from their consumer lives into their professional purchasing and service experiences, so procurement, logistics, and enterprise software all feel this pressure too.