Only 57% of Brands Consistently Deliver Their Experience Promise

Ipsos has released Season 10 of its Experience Perspective podcast, and one number from its Global Voices of Experience research sets the tone: only 57% of organisations report consistently delivering customer experiences that match their brand promise.

That matters because the promised experience is often the reason a customer chooses you in the first place. When delivery slips, the brand stops being the differentiator and quietly becomes a liability.

Customer centricity is an operating system, not a project

The standout episode of the new season is a conversation with Jungheinrich, the material-handling and intralogistics firm. Global Customer Experience Manager Mickael Subileau, CX Project Manager Janice Kaiser and Customer & Organisational Excellence Manager Eva Rodriguez explain how they are trying to turn a product-centric organisation into one that puts customers at the centre of decision-making, leadership and culture. Their stated ambition is to ‘Transform Customers Into Fans’.

The mechanism, they argue, is not another CX initiative. It is governance, sponsorship, accountability and organisational alignment across a global business. They also use the Ipsos Forces of CX framework to read customer emotions and translate feedback into action, because emotions are a key driver of loyalty.

Why experience beats broadcasting

TD Bank’s Andrea Marsales makes a similar point from financial services. The bank is chasing what it calls ‘undisputed leader’ status in customer experience by moving from product and channel thinking to journey-led design, built around customers’ life moments rather than products. Its brand promise, ‘Remarkably Human, Refreshingly Simple’, only works if every interaction behaves that way.

The internal communications episode adds a useful constraint. In hybrid work and information overload, simply communicating more is not the answer. Bhavna Sawnani and Tsara Smith argue that the right channel starts with the outcome you want to achieve, and that leaders and managers have to help employees make sense of organisational messages.

What the data says about emotional connection

Elsewhere in the series, Ipsos research shows that emotionally connected customers recommend brands 4x more often, and recommendations directly influence roughly 1 in 3 new customer acquisitions. Referred customers also bring higher lifetime value and refer more business.

The ESG episode adds a commercial angle: 87% of companies actually increased ESG investment in 2025, and customers in luxury tiers may pay up to 30% more for genuinely sustainable experiences. But the promise only holds if the frontline can deliver it consistently.

Employee listening research pushes the same logic from the inside. As James Tarbit puts it:

"Listening is not the goal, action and improvement are the goal."

More frequent listening only creates value when an organisation has the capacity to respond; the biggest risk is not survey fatigue but inaction fatigue.

Close the promise gap

• Assign a single senior owner for each customer journey, not just a dashboard owner.
• Link employee experience data to customer, operational and commercial outcomes.
• Replace broadcast updates with outcome-first internal communication.
• Use emotional signals, not just friction scores, to find advocacy opportunities.

The underlying message across every episode is consistent: experience is not an add-on. It is the invisible infrastructure of behaviours, processes and decisions that shapes every interaction and every outcome.

Source: Ipsos