The Confidence Disconnect Or: Why Your Customers Don’t Trust You (as Much as You Think)

As a business leader, you might be feeling confident about your relationship with your customers. But what if that confidence is misplaced? Consider this striking finding: 86% of leaders believe customers trust their brand promises, while fewer than half of consumers (44%) actually agree. This isn't just a minor perception gap; it's a critical and costly blind spot known as the "CX Confidence Disconnect."

This disconnect represents the gap between how companies believe customers experience their brand and how customers actually feel. It's a fundamental misreading of the modern customer relationship that can lead to squandered marketing budgets, hidden customer churn and a dangerous sense of complacency. This blog will diagnose the root causes of this disconnect and provide a clear, actionable path to rebuilding the trust that fuels sustainable growth.

Your trust is overestimated

The most dangerous aspect of the CX Confidence Disconnect is the trust gap itself. Leaders are operating with a level of assumed trust that their customers simply do not grant them. That misplaced optimism will eventually become a strategic liability. "The first thing that I would call out is usage does not equal trust... even though you may see people using things, don't misplace that as they trust it," said Justin Robbins, Founder and Principal Analyst, Metric Sherpa, and author of The CX Confidence Disconnect research report.

In today's market, second chances are a luxury most brands are not afforded. The Metric Sherpa report reveals that 59% of consumers have stopped using a brand entirely after just one bad experience — a rate that leaders dangerously underestimate. Furthermore, once trust is broken, it is exceptionally difficult to repair. The report found that only 21% of consumers say they are likely to trust a brand again after it breaks a promise, while a majority (55%) say they are unlikely or very unlikely to.

These statistics reveal a "loyalty illusion" that is reinforced by data from a PwC report, which found that while nearly 90% of executives believe customer loyalty has grown, only 40% of consumers feel the same way. This kind of optimism bias is dangerous because it leads to underinvestment in the foundational reliability and consistency that actually earn customer trust. When leadership believes trust is already secured, they are less likely to invest in the day-to-day operational reliability that truly earns it. This fundamental misreading encourages complacency, setting the stage for service failures and broken promises that customers are increasingly unwilling to forgive.

How AI is actively widening the trust gap

Your investments in AI may be actively backfiring. While intended to enhance CX, mismanaged automation is becoming a primary driver of customer frustration and trust erosion. The data shows that leaders are significantly overestimating customer comfort with AI.

• High usage: Two in three people (66%) intentionally use AI on a regular basis, according to a University of Melbourne/KPMG report
• Low comfort: Yet the PwC survey (referenced in the previous section) found 58% of consumers are only somewhat or not at all comfortable using AI to engage with brands
• Widespread wariness: Reinforcing this, over half (54%) of people are wary about trusting AI systems (University of Melbourne/KPMG)

This discomfort stems from several key missteps that erode trust:

• Ignoring the demand for transparency: Customers feel deceived when they don't know who — or what — they are talking to. The desire for disclosure is nearly universal, with 72% of consumers wanting a brand to disclose every time they are interacting with AI. Put simply, transparency is a baseline requirement for building trust.
• Forgetting the human escape hatch: Nothing frustrates a customer more than being trapped in an automated loop that cannot solve their problem. This experience creates the "compounding Fs": initial Friction leads to escalating Frustration, which ultimately results in service Failure. A seamless, easy-to-find escalation path to a human agent is non-negotiable.
• Misreading generational expectations: Younger, digital-native consumers demand instant gratification; if an AI tool fails, they expect an immediate and seamless handoff to a human who can solve their problem right away. In contrast, older cohorts exhibit a "resigned tolerance" for delays but require absolute transparency and clear human oversight to build trust.

These AI-related issues are symptoms of a deeper, internal problem within the organization.

Your org chart is the root cause

The CX Confidence Disconnect is the predictable outcome of internal blind spots that are the result of "disconnected systems and teams and processes." This reality is why Robbins admits that trying to create a unified experience ignites an "all-out turf war" between departments. These functional silos are not an HR issue; they are a revenue leakage issue. Each fragmented handoff and misaligned incentive directly contributes to customer churn.

The primary root causes can be distilled into three core concepts:

1. Functional silos with competing incentives: In most companies, the teams responsible for the customer experience — sales, marketing and service — operate in separate silos and are often incentivized for conflicting outcomes. The sales team is rewarded for closing deals, marketing for generating leads and service for closing tickets efficiently. This structure inevitably produces a fragmented and inconsistent experience for the customer.

2. The lack of a "rally point": Many leadership teams believe their departments are aligned because they are all moving in the same direction. But a shared direction is not a shared destination. As Robbins puts it: "Right now, we're in Nashville and if I said, 'Hey, our mission is we need to go west.' You end up in Seattle. I end up in San Diego... Businesses all day, every day are heading west and they're never clarifying that actually you and I are going to be in Union Square in San Francisco. That's the rally point." Most organizations have failed to clearly define what "a great customer experience" actually is, leaving teams to pursue their own unaligned interpretations.

3. Flawed metrics and failing programs: Organizations are also hampered by a reliance on outdated and ineffective systems for measuring loyalty. The PwC study reveals that 46% of executives believe their company's current loyalty program will be irrelevant within three years, a stunning admission of strategic failure. This is compounded by a dependence on flawed metrics. Robbins offers a damning critique of Net Promoter Score (NPS), describing it as a "boardroom, back patting barometer" that generates a number but fails to drive meaningful operational action. This helps explain why nearly half of executives now admit their own loyalty programs are heading for irrelevance.

Understanding these internal dysfunctions is the first and most critical step toward building a concrete, lasting solution.

Turning the disconnect into a competitive advantage

While the disconnect is real, it is also solvable. For leaders willing to confront these realities, this gap represents a powerful opportunity to build a competitive advantage that is difficult to replicate. The following four directives offer a clear path forward.

1. Re-baseline trust as a core KPI: Stop treating customer trust as an assumption and start treating it as a business-critical asset. Measure trust as a recurring CX metric with the same rigor and visibility as financial performance. When trust is tracked at the leadership level, it becomes a priority that informs decisions across the entire organization.

2. Unify the experience by aligning incentives: Break down functional silos by creating shared goals and CX key performance indicators (KPIs) that align the entire organization around the customer. When sales, marketing and service are all measured on metrics like customer retention and lifetime value, one department's success no longer comes at the expense of another's. This alignment ensures that the promises made are promises kept.

3. Redesign recovery around action, not apologies: Scrap your empathy-first playbooks. This may be considered going against the grain but when a service failure occurs, your customer's loyalty is transactional. Prioritize speed and restitution. The data shows that customers value fast resolution (23%) and compensation (21%) significantly more than apologies. Re-engineer your service recovery playbooks to empower frontline teams to solve problems quickly and offer fair restitution, turning moments of failure into opportunities to build loyalty.

4. Deploy AI with transparency and choice: Implement AI with clear guardrails that build, rather than erode, trust. Always disclose when a customer is interacting with AI and always provide a clear, easy and immediate path to a human agent. "Always disclose that AI is being used first and foremost... That matters a lot to people. The other thing that mattered a lot is the seamless escalation to humans in the moments where that needs to happen,” said Robbins. Calibrate your AI strategies to meet the different needs of younger and older generations, ensuring that automation enhances the experience without sacrificing the human connection.

The gap between brand perception and customer reality is real, significant and being amplified by the rapid deployment of AI. Leaders are operating with a level of confidence that their customers simply do not share, creating risks in loyalty, revenue and brand reputation. Success in this new era is not just about having the best AI technology. It is about building that technology on a foundation of genuine customer understanding, operational consistency and earned trust.

Ultimately, customers are not demanding perfection. They are demanding consistency, accountability and fairness. In a marketplace where the bar for customer experience is astonishingly low, businesses who close this gap will not just satisfy customers — they will build a fortress of trust that competitors cannot breach.

Want to go deeper? Read The CX Confidence Disconnect report and then tune in to our CX-WISE podcast on YouTube or Spotify to listen to the author, Justin Robbins.