There are few—if any—brand leaders that purposely create bad customer experiences. Those experiences are usually unintentional. That said, we all know that bad experiences still happen. We deal with them all the time in our personal lives. And in our work, we continuously do our best to prevent and recover from them.
Perhaps bad brand experiences are due to a lack of resources or the result of a cost-versus-benefit decision. Maybe they’re because of ineffective customer service training or just a few “bad apples.” They could be the result of innovative tech adopted for customer service automation or AI chatbots creating great efficiency before they’re ready for prime time. All good intentions that sometimes miss the mark.
The thing is, customers aren’t privy to these challenges, nor do they care. What they care about is the experience they have with your brand—an experience they expect to be neutral at worst and highly positive at best. Anything less than that and the unintended emotional impact on your customer will result in lasting harm for both the reputation of your brand and the economic health of your company.
I’m not the first strategist to suggest prioritizing customer experience. However, what I share here outlines both the economic and human impact of neglecting customer experience, and what you can do to be the customer experience champion your organization needs right now.
The pressure on brand leaders to improve customer experience
To bring greater urgency to this challenge, you should know that “customer expectations are rising faster than brands are improving.” So says the Customer Loyalty Engagement Index from Brand Keys, which revealed a 32% increase in 2026—the largest single-year increase since the survey’s inception in 1997.
“Consumer loyalty is getting harder to earn—and easier to lose.” – Robert Passikoff, founder of Brand Keys
But I also know that you’re trying to make ends meet. To do more with less. To navigate the landscape and integrate emerging technology across everything from artificial intelligence (AI) to customer service automation. The pressure will only increase given the rise of agentic branding.
How do I know? Well, apart from conversations I’ve had with some of you, industry reports confirm the same. A 2026 Gartner report revealed that 63% of chief marketing officers (CMOs) are concerned about budget and resource constraints. Meanwhile, the use of marketing technology is now a top priority, with 81% of martech leaders piloting or using AI agents in their work—and under pressure to deliver clear returns on these investments.
The good news is you have an important job to do: to be the bridge between your organization and the people it serves. Your role is to champion what’s best for both your brand and its audience, so that customers feel every aspect of your brand’s expression and experience as being just right. That customer experience is often sacrificed as you and your colleagues strive to simultaneously meet their growth and profitability targets, so the big question is, what can you do about it?
The answer lies in understanding the impact. Only then can you make a valid case for why customer experience improvements are necessary and prioritize efforts in a way that satisfies both sides of the emotional transaction.
The cognitive impact of brand experience on your customers
I suspect you’ll agree with this core belief of mine: brands should exist to make people’s lives better. Less-than-ideal brand experiences do the opposite. They have a negative emotional impact on people.
From a cognitive perspective, damage caused by such negative experiences goes deep and stays there. A bad brand experience isn’t some small disappointment customers get over quickly. It often has a magnified effect on their emotions and manifests in their conscious decisions and behaviors.
Here’s how a customer’s brain reacts to a bad brand experience.
Phase I: The retreat instinct
This instinctive response is rooted in what’s called Approach Avoidance Motivation Theory. We’re constantly weighing the potential positives and negatives associated with things we encounter during our day-to-day activities. When something feels positive, we’re open to bringing it into our life. And when something feels negative, our instinct is to avoid it.
Think about how you feel and react when you’re about to experience something you enjoy— meeting up with a good friend, going to your favorite retail store, using mobile apps you’d prefer not to live without. You smile, lean in, and eagerly engage. How about when you need to deal with something negative? Resolving a conflict, working with a professional who doesn’t value your time, calling customer service. In these cases, you get stressed, your heart may race, and you hesitate.
The same thing happens to customers’ bodies when they suddenly find themselves in a bad customer experience.
Phase II: Amplified negative feelings
Our brains cause us to feel negative thoughts in a more pronounced way than we feel positive thoughts. It’s called negativity bias—a cognitive bias that predisposes negative reactions.
Forrester research reports that the most powerful drivers of positive customer experiences happen when people feel valued, appreciated, and respected. When the opposite happens, negativity bias kicks in.
A bad brand experience feels personal, which can lead to conscious avoidance.
Think about how you feel when a customer service representative is less than friendly. Or when you’re spending a lot of money on something you want, but then one small add-on fee aggravates you. You feel slighted by the unforeseen details. You’re less eager to desire that experience again.
Phase III: Deep, powerful memories
We remember bad experiences more than we remember positive experiences. While positive experiences make us feel good, those feelings are shorter-lived than negative ones. This is especially true for initial brand interactions, whereas longer brand relationships can earn deeper feelings of forgiveness or dissatisfaction.
Think about your last employee performance evaluation. Even if it was highly positive, what you probably remember most are the negative feelings associated with constructive criticism.
Now, think about someone in your life who has betrayed your trust. You probably shared many good moments with that person, but what do you remember most?
Most likely, it’s the betrayal.
What about the bad brand experience you had long ago, yet still remember? Do you harbor a grudge and avoid that brand? My hunch is that you probably have more than one bad brand experience you can recall.
That’s the emotional impact of customer experience. Let’s look at the economic side of the equation next.
The economic impact of bad customer experience
Did you know that only 3% of brands can be categorized as customer-obsessed? The other 97% don’t make customers’ needs, desires, and satisfaction a top priority.
According to Forrester, customer-obsessed organizations report 41% faster revenue growth, 49% faster profit growth, and 51% better customer retention.
On the flip side, PWC reports that 55% of customers say they will stop buying from a company after several bad experiences. In fact, negative brand experiences caused over 25% of their survey respondents to stop buying from a business in the year prior.
In short, your customers won’t stick around for long if they’re subjected to bad brand experiences. Here’s how I suggest championing the improvement of your brand’s customer experience.
Identify the challenges
The first step in championing customer experience is identifying the challenges people have with your brand. There may be some challenges you’re already aware of and some you have yet to identify as frustrating for your customers.
Service delivery and customer communication gaps are the top-cited causes of bad experiences globally, for example. According to Qualtrics, they account for 46% and 45% of all issues respectively, while communication gaps remain the #1 customer complaint in 7 out of 20 industries.
You can learn a lot by talking to the people that regularly interact with your customers. They’ll share very specific details as to where customers are feeling frustrated. It’s likely these front-line employees are aware of frequent customer challenges—ones they feel helpless to solve. You’ll be doing both them and your customers a favor.
Be sure to also look at customer reviews, Net Promoter Score data, and open-ended responses. These can be treasure troves of insight. People generally shy away from writing negative reviews, unless the experience was particularly bad. And while they can be emotionally triggered to write the review or simply looking to get a response from the company, the resulting negative feedback often shines a light on significant, perhaps systemic, issues that are causing your customers to silently stop buying.
Guard the “do not cross line”
As the champion of customer experience improvement in your organization, you make it your responsibility to guard what I call the “do not cross line.” It’s the line between things that improve the customer experience and things that degrade it. Once you’ve identified the common issues causing your brand’s negative customer experiences, you’ll want to fix them and guard your customers from having those experiences again. You’ll also want to stand up for what’s right for your customers internally to prevent bad ideas from turning into bad customer experiences.
If you’ve ever yelled “representative” into the phone when calling for customer service, you know that forcing bad experiences onto good customers is a terrible idea.
One clear example stems from the pressure you (and everyone in your position) is under to leverage AI and automation technology. It’s up to you to protect customers from the potential ramifications of that. After all, there’s plenty of research showing that AI and customer service automation can have a negative impact on the customer experience. Gartner reported that 64% of people would prefer that companies don’t use AI for customer service, while 53% would consider switching to a competitor if they knew AI was used for servicing them.
So, even amidst corporate pressure, there will probably come a time when you’ll need to explain why “AI at all costs” is not the answer.
Make it easy for people
Because of a cognitive effect called simplicity bias, we humans are instinctively wired to choose the path of least resistance. This is the scientific reason behind everyone telling you to prioritize making it easy for people to navigate all aspects of your brand’s experience.
Consider your experience calling customer service and navigating a phone tree, only to be put on hold. Now consider the joy of discovering that you can simply request a callback without losing your place in line. The technology exists, but it’s underleveraged (and I have a special place in my heart reserved for companies that use it).
Make things easier for customers by thinking about how they want to feel at any given touchpoint.
Architecting a memorably beneficial or seamless brand experience asks that you consider, first and foremost, how easy you can make it for your customers to resolve their challenges. When problem resolution feels like an arduous and lengthy process, customers feel disrespected. That emotion gets amplified in their brain and remembered.
But when you quickly and painlessly resolve a customer’s issue, your brand will be seen as heroic. That also gets amplified in their brain and remembered, thereby generating long-term emotional goodwill that leads to return visits, repeat purchases, and deeper engagement.
Be the one to fill your brand’s experience void
Championing the improvement of the experience customers have with your brand fills a critical void. It may not be pinpointed in an Excel, but your organization is most likely experiencing both economic and reputational damage due to ongoing bad experiences people have with your brand. Not to mention the unintentional emotional distress your brand experience is causing them—the same people it’s there to serve—that goes unnoticed altogether.
You’re always going to be up against a balancing act of priorities and action, guided by brand values, commitment, and budget allocations. But as it turns out, advocating on behalf of customers is a surefire way of generating upside for both them and your company’s bottom line.