January 23, 2026
Imagine two customers whose orders both arrive in two days.
One was promised next-day delivery. The other was told to expect their order within five days.
Operationally, they received the same service. Experientially, they did not.
Customer experience is shaped partly by what happens and partly by the reference point customers bring into the interaction. That reference point includes what they thought would happen, what they believe should happen and what previous experiences have taught them is possible.
It can be influenced by brand promises, past interactions, competitor behaviour, reviews and wider service standards. A banking app may be compared with other banking apps, but customers’ sense of what feels simple, fast or intuitive is also shaped by the best digital services they use elsewhere.
This makes experience relative, but not entirely relative.
Research consistently shows that perceived performance is strongly associated with satisfaction. Expectations also matter, but they do not replace the need to deliver a good experience. Instead, they influence the lens through which that delivery is interpreted.
The practical question is therefore not whether experience or expectations matter more.
It is how they work together.
One of the most influential frameworks for understanding this relationship is expectancy-disconfirmation theory.
At its simplest, the model proposes that customers approach an experience with expectations and then compare those expectations with what they believe was delivered.
That comparison can produce three broad outcomes:
This helps explain why two customers can encounter the same service and evaluate it differently. Their experience may be identical, but the standards against which they judge it are not.
It also explains why operational improvements do not always translate neatly into improved customer sentiment. A faster process may still feel slow if customers expected something faster. Conversely, a relatively ordinary experience may be evaluated positively when it performs better than anticipated.
Expectancy-disconfirmation is therefore a useful lens for understanding satisfaction. However, it should not be treated as a precise formula in which performance is simply subtracted from expectation.
Research has found an extremely strong relationship between reported disconfirmation and satisfaction. The relationship is so strong that researchers have questioned whether the two are always meaningfully distinct in customer surveys.
When a customer says an experience “fell short of expectations”, they may effectively be expressing dissatisfaction in different words.
For CX teams, that distinction matters. Asking whether an experience met expectations can be valuable, but it does not necessarily reveal what the customer originally expected or independently measure the size of an objective gap.
Customers do not evaluate experiences from a neutral starting point.
Expectations can act as an anchor, pulling perceptions towards what the customer anticipated. This is known as assimilation.
A customer who expects a service to be reliable may interpret a minor problem as an exception. Someone who expects the same service to be frustrating may pay greater attention to friction and interpret an ambiguous interaction less generously.
This effect appears to be particularly relevant in services, where performance can be difficult to assess objectively. Unlike a physical product, service experiences often involve multiple interactions, changing circumstances and subjective judgements. That ambiguity leaves more room for expectations to influence what customers believe occurred.
Earlier theories proposed that assimilation might operate only when the difference between expectation and performance was small. Once the gap became sufficiently large, a contrast effect was thought to occur, causing customers to exaggerate the difference.
That remains an influential idea, but the evidence does not support the contrast effect being feature of customer satisfaction.
A recent meta-analysis covering 150 research records and 58,597 participants found a positive relationship between expectations and satisfaction, consistent with assimilation. It found no overall evidence supporting contrast effects. The nonlinear threshold proposed by assimilation–contrast theory has also received limited direct testing.
This does not mean customers overlook genuinely poor experiences.
Perceived performance had a much stronger relationship with satisfaction than expectations did in the same analysis. The simpler explanation for a strongly negative response to poor service is usually that the service was poor, not that a separate contrast effect magnified it.
Perceived performance remains the strongest influence on satisfaction. Across the studies included in the meta-analysis, perceived performance had a strong relationship with satisfaction (r = .63).
Expectations also mattered, but their relationship with satisfaction was considerably smaller. Across all study designs, expectations and satisfaction were positively related (r = .29), supporting an assimilation effect.
In experiments designed to isolate the influence of expectations from other factors, the relationship was smaller again (r = .14). This suggests that expectations have a genuine but relatively modest causal effect on satisfaction.
Expectations can colour how customers perceive an experience. They do not, however, matter more than the experience customers believe was delivered.
Although contrast effects may be overstated, the broader issue remains: customer expectations are not fixed.
Customers continually encounter new products, services, technologies and business models. These experiences reshape their understanding of what is possible and, over time, what feels normal.
Features that once differentiated an experience can quickly become standard. Same-day notifications, simple digital onboarding, real-time order tracking and frictionless payments have each moved from novelty to expectation in many categories.
Organisations also shape expectations themselves.
Advertising, service promises, pricing, product positioning and customer communications all provide signals about the experience customers are likely to receive. The stronger and more specific the promise, the clearer the reference point customers carry into the interaction.
This creates a difficult balance.
Overpromising creates an obvious risk when the experience cannot support the claim. But deliberately lowering expectations is not necessarily a cleverer strategy.
The available evidence suggests that higher expectations are generally associated with higher, rather than lower, satisfaction because expectations can positively influence how an experience is perceived.
Recent research found little evidence supporting the common advice that businesses should manage satisfaction by keeping expectations low. Organisations should avoid overpromising, but they should also avoid deliberately underpromising.
The goal should not be to minimise expectations.
It should be to establish credible expectations and deliver strongly against them.
Changing expectations can be difficult to detect through conventional CX measurement.
Most customer surveys are conducted after the experience. By that point, customers’ recollections of what they originally expected may already have been influenced by what happened.
A good experience can make a customer remember their initial expectations more favourably. A poor experience can make the original promise appear clearer or more important in hindsight.
This is one reason studies that measure expectations and satisfaction at the same time tend to find stronger relationships than experiments or longitudinal studies that capture expectations before the experience.
Retrospectively recalled expectations may be affected by hindsight and halo effects.
Where the distinction matters, organisations should consider measuring:
These measures answer related but different questions.
Collapsing them into a single score may make reporting simpler, but it makes the underlying customer dynamic harder to diagnose.
Marketing, sales, service policies and operational communications all contribute to customer experience because they establish what customers anticipate.
Expectation management is not about dampening enthusiasm or lowering the bar. It is about making promises that are clear, valuable and credible, and ensuring the business can consistently support them.
Strong brands and positive expectations can give an experience some interpretive advantage. Customers may be more willing to see an isolated issue as an exception rather than proof of a wider problem.
But this is not permission to tolerate poor delivery.
Perceived performance remains one of the strongest drivers of satisfaction. Expectations can shape an experience, but they cannot manufacture a good one from consistently weak execution.
A satisfaction or NPS score tells an organisation how customers evaluated an experience. It does not necessarily reveal why.
Understanding whether movement is being driven by performance, expectations, particular moments of friction or wider category changes requires additional evidence.
That may include journey-level feedback, behavioural data, customer language, complaint themes, competitor analysis and expectation measures captured at the appropriate point in time.
An organisation can improve while customer standards improve faster.
That does not mean customers inevitably become dissatisfied whenever a competitor launches something better. It means internal progress should be considered within the external environment in which customers make their judgements.
The relevant question is not only:
Are we improving?
It is also:
Are we remaining competitive against the experiences customers now consider normal?
Satisfaction matters because it is associated with more than survey scores.
A meta-analysis covering 245 articles and more than 1.1 million observations found positive associations between customer satisfaction and retention, word of mouth, spending, price outcomes and firm-level performance.
The strength of these relationships varies by context, but the overall commercial connection is well established.
Understanding the conditions that shape satisfaction is therefore not an academic exercise. It helps organisations make better decisions about where experience investment is most likely to protect or create value.
Expectation and experience dynamics occur at the level of individual interactions, but the conditions shaping them often move across entire categories.
As organisations introduce new capabilities, improve service models or reset customer promises, the language customers use to describe good and bad experiences can change.
Problems that were once tolerated become prominent. Features that once generated praise become unremarkable.
No single survey captures this movement particularly well.
CXBI was designed to provide a broader view.
By analysing large volumes of real-world customer feedback and benchmarking customer-perceived experience against long-term industry baselines, CXBI helps identify sustained movements in experience performance.
It is important to be precise about what this means. CXBI does not directly measure every customer’s expectations before an interaction. Instead, it shows how reported experience is changing over time and relative to the wider category.
That outside-in view can help organisations understand:
Expectations may not be directly visible, but their influence can be better understood when experience performance is viewed over time and within its competitive context.
Explore CXBI industry benchmarks.
The beliefs customers hold about what will or should happen during an experience. Expectations may be shaped by past interactions, brand promises, competitor behaviour, reviews and wider service standards.
The customer’s assessment of what happened during the experience. This may differ from the organisation’s operational measurement of what was delivered.
The customer’s perception that an experience exceeded, matched or fell short of expectations.
The tendency for expectations to pull customers’ perceptions or evaluations towards what they anticipated.
A proposed effect in which customers exaggerate differences between expectations and performance. While theoretically influential, recent meta-analytic research found little overall evidence for contrast effects in consumer satisfaction.
The perceived difference between what a customer expected and what they believe was delivered. It is a useful way of interpreting satisfaction, although it may not operate as a simple or objectively measurable calculation.
Anderson, E.W. and Sullivan, M.W. (1993). The Antecedents and Consequences of Customer Satisfaction for Firms. Marketing Science, 12(2), 125–143.
Mittal, V., Han, K., Frennea, C., Blut, M., Shaik, M., Bosukonda, N. and Sridhar, S. (2023). Customer satisfaction, loyalty behaviors, and firm financial performance: what 40 years of research tells us. Marketing Letters, 34, 171–187.
Oliver, R.L. (1980). A Cognitive Model of the Antecedents and Consequences of Satisfaction Decisions. Journal of Marketing Research, 17(4), 460–469.
Schiebler, T., Lee, N. and Brodbeck, F.C. (2025). Expectancy-disconfirmation and consumer satisfaction: A meta-analysis. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
Szymanski, D.M. and Henard, D.H. (2001). Customer Satisfaction: A Meta-Analysis of the Empirical Evidence. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 29, 16–35.
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