The hardest part of meeting customer expectations used to be about launching new channels or features. Now it’s about understanding the intent behind every interaction. Questions like Why did this person reach out? and What outcome are they chasing? now shape whether an experience builds brand trust or weakens it.
That’s why CSG fielded a global study with Wakefield Research to get a clearer picture of what customers expect in 2026 and how those expectations should influence CX strategy. In the webinar, “From Chaos to Clarity: How to Win Loyalty in 2026,” three experts dug into the survey data and its takeaways for brands:
-
- Erin Veltkamp, Director of Product Marketing, CSG
-
- Keith Wilson, Executive Director of Product Management for Customer Experience, CSG
-
- Raymond Gerber, Co-Founder of the Institute for Journey Management
Watch the full webinar here to catch the conversation, or keep reading for the major takeaways.
Overwhelmed Customers Tune Out (And Miss Out)
Erin Veltkamp shared the (unsurprising?) finding that 70% of consumers feel that brands send so many messages, they “no longer care what brands are trying to say.” In response, customers are tuning out—and dismissing important notifications such as appointment and payment reminders and service updates. More than half (59%) of consumers have deleted critical messages because they mistook them for marketing.
That noise doesn’t lower customer expectations. If anything, it raises them. Customers expect brands to cut through the chaos with clarity: tell me what’s important, tell me what changed, and tell me what to do next.
As Erin put it, the State of the Customer Experience Report’s findings point to a simple truth: customers want clarity, not more contact.
“Customers are navigating more information, more channels, more choices than ever,” Erin said, “and loyalty feels really hard to earn.”
When Messages Miss the Moment
If customers are overwhelmed, why aren’t brands just sending fewer messages? According to the Institute for Journey Management’s Raymond Gerber, it’s not from bad intentions:
“Brands actually don’t do it deliberately, but it’s the structure, the technology, and the way you have organizational silos that creates what I call a flood of uncoordinated messages.”
The typical pattern:
- Marketing pushes a campaign.
- Product sends an update.
- Service teams respond to tickets.
- Automation fires independently in the background.
None of those systems really know what the others are doing, or what the customer is trying to do in that moment.
Keith Wilson described it as brands having “overachieved on omnichannel.”
“You’ve introduced all of these incredibly different ways to engage with your brand, and 10% of your customer base likes each one of them the best,” he added.
The result is a sea of messages that:
- Don’t line up with the customer’s immediate goal
- Arrive too late (or too early)
- Conflict across channels or teams
In other words, the experiences technically “work” but still violate consumer expectations for relevance and timing.
Keith offered a personal example to illustrate the point: He’d once received a text from a hotel that said his room was ready for check‑in—four hours after he had already checked in. That message included special offers and highlighted places to eat on the property.
“But the fact they started it with ‘your room is now ready for check-in,’ it was so clear to me that the rest of the message just didn’t matter anymore, and I was on the way to delete it,” he said.
The message itself wasn’t bad. It was just late. And in 2026, timing is part of the message.
What Customers Actually Expect: 3 Simple Demands
Across personalization, service and AI, the panelists raised three practical customer expectations that should anchor any digital customer experience strategy:
1. “Know what I need right now.”
Customers want brands to understand what they’re trying to do in the moment.
“Loyalty is based on trust,” Raymond said. “Trust is built when a customer feels the brand understands them, and engagement is consistent and relevant all the time.”
In practice, that means:
- If a customer is troubleshooting, they’re unlikely to appreciate a discount code (even if it’s perfectly personalized).
- If they’re exploring options, they don’t want a renewal reminder yet.
- If they’re completing a sensitive task, they don’t want generic marketing layered on top.
These are simple customer expectations examples, but they illustrate the same theme: context first, content second.
2. “Reach out at the right time, on the right channel.”
People still want reminders, alerts and updates, but only when they’re useful and on time.
From the State of the Customer Experience Report:
- 74% of consumers say helpfulness is a top factor in making them comfortable with personalized messages.
- 57% say they would leave a brand after a fraud incident, making real‑time authentication and alerts non‑negotiable.
“You can have the absolute perfect message, with a highly personalized way of making a very particular offer to a very particular customer,” Keith said. “But… if it’s a few minutes late, you’ve lost the window.”
This is where meeting customer expectations becomes a design problem: orchestrating journeys and communications around the customer’s clock instead of the campaign calendar.
3. “Make my life easier.”
Finally, customers expect brands to remove effort rather than add it.
- 44% cited difficulty resolving issues (e.g., confusing self‑service, no follow‑up) as a top reason for leaving a brand.
- Many get stuck in what Keith called “frenetic channel switching”—bouncing between web, app and email just to find a vaccine appointment time or technician arrival window.
What they want instead is clear, proactive help:
“That is basically consumers saying, please bring the most relevant and timely details to me. I don’t want to go find them,” Keith said.
This is where well‑designed journeys, intelligent routing and simple, guided experiences across channels become a competitive advantage.
Rethinking Digital CX Strategy Around Expectations, Not Channels
One of the most important shifts the panel called for: stop treating “channel coverage” as a proxy for customer expectations.
Raymond argued that traditional, touchpoint‑based CX has trained brands to obsess over “moments of truth” in isolation instead of the journey as customers live it over time.
He recommended a different lens:
- Move from moments of truth to moments of value. Every interaction should add enough value that the customer wants to have another one.
- Use journey analytics to see where friction really happens (repeats, loops, drop‑offs, and forced channel switches) and not just whether the final outcome was achieved.
- Treat friction as a signal instead of a failure metric. Some friction (like a proactive call from an agent in a high‑risk situation) can actually protect loyalty when it’s driven by the right context.
“You have to find out what’s broken before customers complain,” Raymond said. “Proactive brands earn loyalty faster.”
Where AI Still Needs to Earn Customer Trust
Customers want AI to help, but they don’t fully trust it to act on their behalf, according to the State of the Customer Experience Report. More than half of consumers (56%) say they’re uncomfortable letting AI take actions for them, and Gen Z is the only generation where the majority say AI agents are more effective than human agents at customer support.
The panel drew a practical line between good AI jobs and risky AI jobs:
- Where AI fits today: resolving simple questions, explaining account details, managing appointments and reminders—places where it quietly removes effort and gets people unstuck.
- Where trust is tougher to earn: handling payments, changing account settings or acting “behind the scenes” without clear controls.
Raymond said that loyalty depends on context‑aware AI.
“When AI is deployed without context—customer context, journey context, interaction context—it operates blindly,” he added. In that environment, AI can generate highly personalized messages that are still irrelevant.
He suggested posing three questions to every AI‑assisted step:
- Where is this customer in their journey right now?
- What are they trying to get done?
- What outcome do they expect next?
Keith added that half‑finished automation can feel worse than none at all. Customers quickly lose trust when an AI agent only gets them “40 or 50 or 60% of the job” before handing them off or forcing them to repeat steps.
Steps for Meeting Customer Expectations in the ‘Age of Overwhelm’
The panel closed with advice for leaders who likely feel as overwhelmed as their customers:
Audit what you send vs. what customers do
Keith’s “one thing” was to line up your outbound communications against actual customer behavior and ask, does all of this make sense? Many brands discover they could cut a large portion of messages and get better results.
Pick one journey and go deep
Raymond recommended becoming “obsessed one journey at a time”—using journey analytics to understand where friction clusters and where expectations are most at risk, instead of trying to fix everything everywhere at once.
Design around timing as much as content
From fraud alerts to service updates to renewals, the panel consistently returned to timing as a core part of meeting customer expectations: right message, right moment, right channel, or not at all.
Erin summarized the opportunity:
“The personalization, implementing AI, understanding customer intent—all of that is really important. But if [customers] are getting hit with a bunch of messages at once… the clarity is never going to come on action [the customer should take]. So I think the coordination of channels is a great place to start to help break down some of this overwhelm that we’re seeing.”
Want more strategies to build customer loyalty?
Read the 2026 State of the Customer Experience Report.
