Mind the CX gap: key takeaways from Moneypenny’s Customer Experience Divide roundtable

As moderator of Moneypenny’s landmark CX Divide roundtable, Oliver Pickup brought together 13 senior customer experience professionals to debate the research findings and came away with hard-won wisdom, uncomfortable data, a provocative new AI framework, and a shocking story about ski boots.

When did you last have a truly memorable customer experience, for the right reasons? Exemplars are surprisingly hard to recall.

Indeed, Moneypenny’s new CX Divide research, which surveyed 2,000 senior UK decision-makers and 5,001 consumers on the same questions, found that only one in 10 consumers can name a single positive experience that stuck with them.

We live in an age of supposedly unprecedented technological capability, AI-powered everything, and relentless talk about customer centricity. And yet the vast majority of us draw a blank when recalling a positive CX experience.

“Across every single channel tested, businesses rated their own performance significantly higher than customers did.

The bad ones, of course, come flooding back. For instance, Lindsay Mitchell, Head of Customer at Christopher Ward, the British luxury watch brand, spent £300 on a pair of ski boots, had them professionally fitted, yet found them unbearably painful. She rang the retailer. The store manager never called back. Lindsay emailed; replies took three days. She tried calling the store directly; it rang out to an automated system no one answered. When a refund was finally agreed, she was asked to post the boots back and keep her proof of postage. The retailer then lost the boots. Could she send proof of postage? She did. More than a month later, Lindsay’s refund still hadn’t arrived.

Meanwhile, Greg Mace, founder of CX consultancy Gweal, shared an equally frustrating story. His stay at a luxury hotel and spa was exceptional. The people, the treatments, and the food were all faultless. Then he arrived home to a cascade of 30 emails asking him to rate every individual element of the experience. “It had the effect of diminishing the memory of what was genuinely a positive experience,” he said.

Both stories were shared on 21 April, the day Moneypenny published the CX Divide research, at an intimate breakfast roundtable in London of 13 senior customer experience professionals, which I moderated. The room included leaders from professional services, retail, financial services, luxury goods, and beyond. What followed was an hour of frank, forensic debate about the gap between what businesses think they’re delivering and what customers are actually experiencing.

The counterpoint to Lindsay and Greg came from Darren Stott, a CX consultant at Moneypenny. He started filling in an online membership application for a golf club on a Sunday. His children interrupted him; he abandoned it halfway through. On Tuesday, his phone rang. It was the golf club. They’d noticed he’d dropped off mid-application, had his number from what he’d entered, and were calling to ask what questions he had. He joined on the spot.

Consider these three illustrative interactions. One caused a month of unnecessary annoyance. Another turned a brilliant experience into an administrative grind. And one cost almost nothing and won a customer for life. The research headline captures why this matters at scale: across every single channel tested, businesses rated their own performance significantly higher than customers did.

Where the customer experience gap is widest

The gaps were widest in the channels attracting the most investment. Social media showed a 36 percentage point gap between business belief and consumer reality. Web forms followed at 32 percentage points, with chatbots at 28. The phone, the channel businesses have been moving away from for years, had one of the smaller gaps. Customers still trust it most.

The measurement problem

Greg’s 30-email story highlights how many businesses are measuring the wrong things and concluding everything is fine.

Giles Gordon-Smith, a luxury CX specialist, made the same point differently. He was staying at a hotel near Iguazú Falls when the receptionist took the time to explain the business centre, where guests could print 15 documents for free. What she didn’t mention was that hotel guests could enter the national park before it opened to the public, in the early morning quiet, with the falls essentially to themselves. He only discovered this on day two, too late to use it. “To all intents and purposes, they ticked lots of boxes,” he said. “But for our experience, it was missing its potential.”

Tick-box metrics tell you what happened. They rarely tell you how it felt. And it’s the feeling that determines whether someone comes back.

Speed is the floor, not the ceiling

The Moneypenny research found that 77% of businesses believe customers will keep trying if there’s no response. Only 23% actually will, creating a 54 percentage point gap built on an assumption that is wrong three times out of four.

Jonathan Winchester, chief executive of Insight6, put a price on it. Speaking at a recent high-end jewellery conference, he placed out-of-hours enquiries with the businesses in the room as a live test. More than half had no online presence after 5pm. “I said, ‘You turn over £1 billion. Why can’t you afford £6,000 to provide that service?’” The businesses were shocked. They’d simply never looked. Missed demand is invisible when customers don’t complain; they just leave.

The research calls this the “one-shot economy”. The expectation of an immediate response, shaped by years of Amazon customer service and same-day everything, has become the baseline. Miss it, and you haven’t just frustrated a customer; you’ve probably lost them.

Get the basics right first

Jesper With-Fogstrup, Group CEO of Moneypenny and author of the report’s foreword, attended as a delegate. His view was that many businesses are making a fundamental mistake by investing in sophisticated experiences before getting the basics right. Too many, he argued, are seduced by the glossy layer, the personalisation, the AI, the omnichannel architecture, while the underlying fundamentals remain unreliable. And when a customer finally hits that weak point, all the sophistication in the world won’t save them.

The research backs him up. Some 87% of businesses rate personalisation as important on first contact, against only 68% of customers. The room kept returning to the same conclusion: customers want their issue resolved quickly, explained clearly, with a human available if things get complicated. Everything else is secondary.

AI for the repeatable, humans for the meaningful

The AI section produced the session’s most striking single finding. The highest comfort score in the entire dataset for AI in customer service wasn’t a capability. It was a guarantee: knowing you can reach a real person at any point.

Anthony Oribabor, Customer Operations Leader at Omaze, said his organisation had moved deliberately away from email and messaging channels towards phone and live chat, keeping humans present at every step that mattered. “AI helps us with the repeatable,” he said. “Humans deal with the meaningful.” Adam Day, whose Nasdaq-listed company ExP has gone fully AI-native and is building its own platforms from scratch, pushed the point further. “There will be frustration in the early days,” he said. “But that’s the only way you’re going to get AI to become as powerful as you need it.”

Lindsay had the last word. Around 70% of her time goes on people: engagement, culture, the daily work of building a team that genuinely wants to show up for customers. “They are the front end of the brand,” she said. Great customer experience can’t be engineered from above. It lives in the people delivering it, and whether they feel trusted enough to go off-script when the moment calls for it.

The golf club knew that. The ski retailer didn’t.