Industry body · PwC US Consulting
Consumer Expectation Gap 2025: 50-Point Divide on Customer Loyalty
PwC's 2025 Customer Experience Survey, "The Loyalty Illusion," finds a 50-point perception gap on customer loyalty: 89% of executives say it has grown, only 39% of consumers agree. 70% of executives concede that customer expectations are outpacing their company's ability to keep up.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- 50pp Perception gap between executives (89%) and consumers (39%) on whether customer loyalty has grown in recent years. The headline finding that gives the study its name.
- 5,511 US consumers polled in spring 2025, paired with a 406-executive sample so that the same questions could be measured from both sides.
- 70% Of executives say customer expectations are evolving faster than their company can keep up.
- 59% Of consumers cite personalised experiences or offers as something that could earn their loyalty.
- 52% Of consumers have stopped buying from a brand because of a bad experience with its products or services.
- 29% Of consumers have stopped using a brand specifically due to poor customer service, either online or in-person.
- 57% Of executives admit their loyalty programmes are not delivering the outcomes they need.
- 46% Of executives expect their loyalty programme to be obsolete within the next three years.
What the report covers
PwC's annual Customer Experience Survey paired two large samples in spring 2025 (5,511 US consumers and 406 executives) to measure the same questions from both sides and quantify the gap directly. The headline is stark: 89% of executives say customer loyalty has grown, while only 39% of consumers agree. PwC titled the study "The Loyalty Illusion" for that reason.
The dataset goes beyond loyalty perception. 70% of executives concede their company is being outrun by customer expectations. On the consumer side, more than half (52%) have walked away from a brand because of a bad product or service experience, and 29% have left specifically over poor customer service. 59% of consumers identify personalised experiences or offers as a credible loyalty driver, a category that executives consistently underweight relative to brand communications and social media activity.
Loyalty programmes themselves are flagged as a structural problem. 57% of executives say their current programme is not delivering the outcomes they need, and 46% expect it to be obsolete inside three years. The "expectation gap" framing that surfaced in retail trade press a decade ago has not closed. The 2025 PwC data shows it has widened on the metric that matters, which is whether the customer actually feels more loyal than they did before.
What this means for UK marketers
For UK marketers and ecommerce operators, three implications come out of the 2025 PwC data.
First, the boardroom view of loyalty is structurally optimistic and almost certainly overstated. If 89% of executives believe loyalty is up while only 39% of customers agree, internal dashboards (repeat purchases, NPS, programme engagement) are not measuring the right thing. Adding a direct "do you feel more loyal to us than you did last year?" question to brand tracking or post-purchase surveys is a cheap audit against the illusion.
Second, the 70% of executives admitting expectations are outpacing the business is permission to fund the operational basics that consumers actually weight. The two largest commercial signals on the consumer side are the 52% who leave over bad products or service and the 59% who cite personalisation. Both are tractable. Site performance, fulfilment reliability, and post-purchase comms sit inside the operator's control more readily than headline brand investments do.
Third, the 57% of executives saying loyalty programmes are underdelivering, and the 46% expecting obsolescence within three years, is a strong signal to stop adding tiers and rewards before fixing the experience underneath. UK retailers running a points scheme on top of unreliable delivery, unclear returns, or generic email flows are likely making the loyalty illusion worse, not better. Investment in CX measurement and personalisation infrastructure tends to pay back faster than headline programme refreshes.
How they got the data
PwC US Consulting fielded "The Loyalty Illusion" Customer Experience Survey in spring 2025, with results published on 29 September 2025. The base was 5,511 US consumers and 406 US executives, surveyed in parallel so that perception gaps could be measured directly on the same questions. PwC frames the analysis around the "experience supply chain," the connected sequence of interactions that runs from discovery through to advocacy.
The sample is US-only, which is a caveat when reading the absolute percentages across to UK retail and ecommerce. The perception-gap mechanism itself (executives indexing on internal metrics they control while customers define loyalty emotionally) is structural rather than geography-specific, and the same direction is visible in PwC UK's Consumer Sentiment Survey. UK marketers should read the directional findings as applicable. The absolute percentage points remain US figures.
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From PwC US Consulting · published 29/09/2025