Customers stopped grading businesses on a curve a while ago. They now judge a claims update from an insurer by the same standard as a delivery notification from Amazon, or a recommendation from Netflix. And some businesses have yet to realise just how damaging that shift can be.
This article deep dives into the first of five forces reshaping how organisations communicate with customers, drawing from our new report, The Five Forces Shaping Customer Experience as well as expert insights from our Digital Growth Director, Leilah Aintaoui.
The Cost of a Bad Customer Experience
New research from Aspire CCS shows how expensive that gap has become.
One in five customers worldwide switched provider in the last twelve months because of a poor communications experience. Among 18 to 45 year olds, that rises to one in four.
Look at why, and the picture gets sharper. Five of the top six reasons people gave for leaving were tied directly to the communication itself: information that was wrong, inconsistent, unclear, irrelevant, or simply delivered in the wrong tone.
Communication is the Experience
That statistic deserves more attention than it usually gets.
Communications teams tend to think of tone, timing and channel as finishing touches, added once the real business decisions have already been made elsewhere. Customers don’t see it that way. To them, a badly timed email or a confusing statement is no different to a faulty product or a broken service.
The relationship doesn’t have a back office. Every communication a customer receives is evidence of how much the business values them, and they’re weighing that evidence constantly.
Leilah Aintaoui, Digital Growth Director at MBA Group, explains: “Customers don’t separate ‘communications’ from ‘experience’ the way businesses do internally. To them, a badly timed message or an irrelevant email damage trust just as much as a poor product experience.”
For businesses, this switch-rate figure should be acted on urgently: “The switch-rate statistic in this report shouldn’t be filed away as a marketing insight. One in five people are walking away because of poor communications, and that makes it a business-critical issue. I’ve lost count of the clients we work with who are investing heavily to acquire new customers while giving far less attention to retaining the ones they already have.”
Where the Benchmark Came From
Where did this expectation come from, and why now?
It didn’t arrive suddenly. Decades of instant access to goods, services and information have quietly reset what “normal” looks like. Algorithms that curate content, deliveries that arrive within hours, recommendations that feel instinctive rather than generic: these experiences train people to expect relevance and speed everywhere, not just from the platforms that built the habit in the first place.
Leilah traces the pattern to a specific group setting the pace: “It’s younger customers who are setting that benchmark. Their expectations have been shaped by real-time, personalised experiences everywhere else in their lives. That level of relevance and immediacy is quietly becoming the baseline against which every brand is judged.”
The Gap Between Channels and Content
Most organisations already have the channels this demands. They have chat, a portal, an app, probably several of each.
What they don’t have, in most cases, is content built for the conversation happening inside those channels. Aspire’s research found that despite heavy investment in real-time, interactive technology such as conversational AI, intelligent virtual assistants and rich messaging, most businesses are still delivering that content as a static PDF attached to an email. The channel has changed. The thinking behind what flows through it largely hasn’t.
Leilah sees this as the real blocker, and it isn’t a technical one: ” When we speak to clients, we never say, ‘do more, send more.’ We say, ‘do more with what you already have.’ That means redesigning the message around the conversation the customer actually wants, or needs, to have, delivered through the channel they prefer.”
The deeper obstacle is in the culture: “The biggest blocker isn’t technical. It’s cultural. Too many teams still think in terms of ticking a compliance box and sending a statement, rather than seeing every communication as an opportunity to build trust, demonstrate value and strengthen the customer relationship.”
Three Stages of Maturity
Organisations at the earliest stage still treat communications as a cost centre and a compliance obligation, run by IT and Operations with less interest in how the message lands. Much of the market sits at the next stage, where line-of-business teams have pushed for more digital, responsive channels, but the content itself is still document-based and built in departmental silos rather than around a shared view of the customer.
Only at the most mature stage do marketing and CX leaders use AI and real-time data to run something closer to an ongoing dialogue, built around the customer’s actual journey rather than the business’s internal process for producing a document.
What Real Dialogue Requires
That progression matters because it reframes what “improving communications” really means. Adding a chat widget or launching an app doesn’t move an organisation up that ladder on its own.
Real dialogue depends on the groundwork underneath it: unified customer data, content built for interaction rather than repurposed from a document, and a governance model that lets teams move quickly without losing consistency. Businesses that treat this as a channel roadmap tend to end up with more channels delivering the same static thinking, just in more places at once.
Get it right, and the upside compounds. Leilah shares what’s at stake for the organisations that make this shift: “The organisations that recognise that shift will unlock greater customer lifetime value than ever before.”
One Force Among Five
Consumer expectation is a powerful force reshaping how organisations think about customer communications. But it isn’t working alone.
It’s colliding with regulation, turning many of these same expectations into legal obligations. With AI, moving from pilot projects into production at scale. With marketing and operational communications converging into a single customer relationship. And with operational fragmentation, still holding many businesses back from delivering on any of it.
The challenges explored here are exactly why we built MBA Pulse: to help organisations move from disconnected communications towards more connected customer conversations.
We examine all five of these forces, and how they reinforce each other, in the full report, The Five Forces Shaping Customer Experience.
Download the report to uncover where your organisation sits, and what impact the other four forces have on your future strategy.