As customer expectations surge, Havas CX flags a growing ‘experience debt’ across brands

At a time when customers can get groceries in 10 minutes and ambulance services at 4 a.m., brands are being judged against benchmarks far beyond their own category. That, in essence, is the central finding of Havas CX’s seventh edition of the X Index 2025, unveiled in Mumbai this week.

Based on responses from nearly 59,000 consumers across eight countries and covering 580 brands, the study maps what it calls the widening gap between brand promise and lived customer experience, a gap Havas terms “experience debt.”

“It’s about understanding the gap between what brands communicate to create interest, desire, and appeal, and what they actually deliver in experiences that not only meet consumer needs but also deliver on those promises. The most meaningful brands do both. They advertise, they communicate, they create excitement, and they deliver,” said David Shulman, Global CEO, Havas CX. “The X INDEX report points out that there is a gap. For many brands, that gap is significant.”

The CX gap

The X INDEX evaluates brands across 19 experience indicators grouped under four pillars: Functional, Personal, Emotional, and Collective. These are measured across the entire customer journey, from discovery and purchase to service and advocacy.

In India, the 2025 report covers 47 brands across 8 categories, with CX insights into Banking, Fashion & Luxury, Automobile, Insurance, Financial Services, E-Retail, Hospitality and Technology.

What the 2025 report finds is that not a single category in India fully meets customer expectations.

Consumers today are:

• Less tolerant of friction

• More influenced by cross-category benchmarks

• Increasingly sceptical of glossy communication unsupported by action

The study notes a behavioural shift: functional excellence is now table stakes. What differentiates brands is personal relevance and emotional resonance, delivered operationally, not just advertised.

Havas CX rankings: The Top 10

Tata Motors

Tata CliQ Luxury

OnePlus

Taj

Mahindra

Zerodha

Apple

JBL

Hyatt

HDFC

Where brands are winning

Among Indian categories, automotive, hospitality, and technology emerged as top performers in overall satisfaction. The overall average satisfaction score across automotive, personality, and technology categories is 8.32.

Automotive brands came closest to aligning promise and delivery. Established service ecosystems, transparent product journeys and post-sales dependability helped brands like Tata Motors, Mahindra, Hyundai, Nexa and Kia narrow the expectation gap.

Customers enter this category with high involvement and heavy research. The brands that win are those that manage the entire journey, product, servicing, digital interfaces and dealership experiences, consistently.

Hospitality, built inherently around experience, performed strongly. Brands such as Oberoi and Hyatt were cited for staying closest to customer expectations.

In this category, personalisation and operational excellence are inseparable. Misses are amplified; so are thoughtful gestures.

Technology remains a high-expectation category. Apple came closest to balancing astronomical consumer expectations with delivery, aided by ecosystem integration and seamless digital-store continuity.

However, the category overall struggled to fully meet evolving AI-led expectations. Consumers now expect speed, intelligence and predictive assistance as default features.

Where brands are struggling

If high-performing categories reveal how to close the gap, lower-performing ones show why it exists.

Insurance suffers from low-frequency but high-emotion touchpoints. Customers engage when something has gone wrong. Emotional reassurance, not product differentiation, drives perception.

Max Life emerged as one of the only brands closely matching expectations, largely due to performance in emotional reassurance.

Banking’s challenge lies in maintaining reliability across massive operations. Functional parity across banks is high, differentiation lies in personal experience and service responsiveness.

HDFC Bank’s integration of services through WhatsApp was cited as an example of meeting customers “where they already are.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise was fashion and luxury, a category rich in emotional storytelling but struggling to match operational delivery.

Physical retail resurgence, boutique competition and online-offline pricing inconsistencies have heightened scrutiny. The margin for error is narrow, and benchmarks are often set outside the category.

The rise of ‘experience debt’

A key concept introduced in the report is experience debt,  the cumulative trust erosion that occurs each time a brand fails to match expectations.

According to the study, this debt builds for three primary reasons:

1. Category disruption: New entrants reset benchmarks (e.g., 10-minute delivery models influencing broader retail expectations).

2. Promises without action: Consumers are increasingly sceptical of purpose-led communication not backed by operational proof.

3. Static experiences in a dynamic market: Businesses failing to evolve at startup speed lose relevance.

Notably, consumers no longer compare banks with banks or fashion brands with fashion brands. The best experience anywhere becomes the expected experience everywhere.

The ‘proof stack’: Closing the CX gap

To address experience debt, Havas CX proposes what it calls a “Proof stack”, three imperatives:

1. Proof of seamless experience

Every touchpoint must behave as if it shares intelligence, from onboarding to after-sales service.

2. Proof of emotion

Emotional storytelling must extend into operations. It’s not just about campaigns but about how a delivery executive behaves, how a complaint is resolved, or how stress moments are handled.

3. Proof of performance

Brands must deliver reliably at critical moments. Performance is now relative, shaped by the best experience consumers have had anywhere.

Taken together, the findings suggest that the CX conversation is no longer about incremental improvements. It is about alignment.

As customer expectations surge, shaped by the fastest delivery, the smoothest interface, the most empathetic service interaction they’ve experienced anywhere, brands are being evaluated on their ability to consistently match promise with performance.