Twenty-five years ago, American Airlines introduced an innovation that transformed air travel. It was online check-in. In reality, however, the airline redefined the psychology of the modern consumer. Customers adopted the idea that time-consuming administrative tasks could be completed instantly and independently. A customer experience within a single industry reshaped expectations across the entire market. Self-service quickly spread beyond aviation into e-commerce, banking, and eventually public administration. It became the new standard.
This phenomenon is known as liquid expectations. In practice, it means that your customers no longer evaluate their experience solely against your direct competitors. Instead, they compare it with the best interaction they have ever experienced. It could be ordering a ride, shopping for groceries, or securing mortgage approval in just a few clicks.
Salesforce research confirms this trend. 62% percent of consumers and B2B buyers state that their experience with a company in one industry directly influences what they expect from companies in every other industry. A customer who can open a bank account in just a few minutes on a mobile phone naturally expects changing an insurance policy or filing an insurance claim to be equally simple and fast.
As Kristína Malíková, an expert in customer experience transformation, explains in the latest State of Customer Experience in the Slovak Market Report:"Customer experience standards naturally spill over across industries. Once customers become accustomed to a high level of speed, convenience, or transparency in one sector, they expect the same standard everywhere else."
This trend is equally transforming the B2B landscape. A procurement director at a manufacturing company expects the same level of order-tracking transparency from a materials supplier as they receive when tracking a dinner delivery through a mobile app. They also expect the same effortless payment experience they enjoy through their banking application.
Liquid expectations also create opportunities for competitors beyond the boundaries of a given industry. Unmet customer needs do not have to be addressed only by existing or new players within the same category. Consider a digital bank that leverages the trust of its customers and the quality of its digital banking services. It can successfully expand into the insurance market.
When organizations fail to meet customer expectations, they create opportunities for others. Over time, unmet needs evolve into demand for better solutions. This creates a competitive opportunity for the organization that is first to close the expectation gap, regardless of the industry in which it originally operates.
Opportunities of liquid expectations
To turn liquid expectations into a sustainable competitive advantage, organizations need to move beyond traditional management models and embrace four fundamental shifts.
From projects to continuous transformation
Many companies in Central and Eastern Europe still manage customer experience as a series of isolated projects with clearly defined endpoints. In the era of liquid expectations, this approach is no longer sustainable. Market standards evolve faster than organizations can approve the budget for the next transformation phase. Transformation must become a continuous organizational capability. Organizations need to continuously refine their processes and the value they deliver to customers.
In practice, this means moving away from project-based change management. Instead, organizations should adopt a model of continuous improvement in which processes, products, and customer experience are managed as an integrated whole.
Redefining benchmarks
Benchmarking against local competitors within the same industry has become a recipe for mediocrity.
Instead of asking what competitors are doing, organizations should continuously monitor what is shaping customer expectations. Look for innovations beyond your own industry. Then deliberately incorporate the most valuable elements into the design of your own products and services.
Shorter decision cycles and a culture of rapid experimentation
Market standards are subject to constant inflation. They become outdated faster than they can stabilize. If your organization requires six months to approve a change in its purchasing process, you are optimizing for yesterday's reality.
To avoid this, organizations should foster a culture of rapid experimentation. They should validate hypotheses with real customers as quickly as possible and iterate based on what they learn.
Customer experience built around customer mindsets
Traditional demographic segmentation based on factors such as age, income, or location is becoming increasingly insufficient. It is being replaced by fragmented customer groups shaped by different experiences, lifestyles, and social contexts. As a result, each group develops different expectations.
Customer experience design must therefore be built around customer mindsets and contextual hyper-personalization. Organizations need the ability to deliver the right information and service based on how customers behave rather than simply on who they are.
From Reaction to Prediction
For business leaders, liquid expectations represent an opportunity rather than a threat. They provide early signals of where unmet customer needs are emerging. They reveal which solutions are succeeding in other industries. They also highlight innovations worth introducing into your own market before anyone else.
For organizations, this means systematically monitoring changing customer expectations beyond the boundaries of their own industry. The ability to experiment quickly, iterate continuously, and transfer insights into products and processes is becoming just as important as technological infrastructure itself.
The question is no longer whether customer expectations will change. The real question is: Are your processes designed to detect those changes before your competitors do?
