Would you rather be a king 500 years ago or a middle-class person today?
Your answer says a lot about how you understand human satisfaction. If you think satisfaction is about objective conditions—clean water, antibiotics, Google in your pocket—you’ll probably choose modern middle class. If you think it’s all relative—that satisfaction lives in the gap between what you expected and what you got—you might lean king. I mean, sure he had syphilis and no plumbing, but he also had zero expectations of air travel, Netflix, or customer service surveys.
By almost every measure, we are better off than our ancestors. And yet, we’re somehow more annoyed, more anxious, and more likely to write a one-star review because the avocado toast arrived “a bit soggy.”
Why?
Because our DNA is a cruel little algorithm that raises our expectations as soon as things get better. It’s like a treadmill that speeds up every time you start jogging comfortably.
“We become happy when reality matches our expectations.” – Yuval Harari
(and unhappy when our marketing team promises luxury and delivers…well, something less than that)
In the business world, especially in customer experience, this equation is everything:
Customer Satisfaction = Reality ≥ Expectations
Let me give you two examples from the trenches.
First, a win. A local government agency was beaming with pride on the evening news. They had cut their wait times from 3 hours to 1 hour. People were thrilled. Not because 60 minutes in a bureaucratic hellscape is anyone’s dream—but because they expected 3 hours and got out in 1. Victory.
Now contrast that with a luxury hospitality brand where I once delivered a brutal customer feedback report to a room of very uncomfortable executives. The Head of Guest Services—clearly offended—snarled, “They’re probably writing these sh*tty reviews from the golden toilets in their suites.” I flipped to a page and read aloud:
“I was promised opulence fit for royalty and was underwhelmed.”
And there it was. The problem wasn’t reality. It was marketing. The guest didn’t arrive with neutral expectations. They came expecting Versailles and got Vegas.
So here’s the uncomfortable truth: Your biggest customer service problem may not be your call center, your frontline team, or even your product. It might be your marketing department.
While you’re breaking your back to improve things little by little, they’re out there with Super Bowl budgets promising the moon and a yacht to get there.
Expectations are being inflated not just by your brand, but by every other experience your customer is having. I bought my son a one-year-old Nissan for his 16th birthday. He was overjoyed—right up until his best friend pulled up in a brand-new car with every feature short of flight mode. Suddenly, my generous dad move felt…meh.
Customer satisfaction isn’t a box you check. It’s a moving target, a psychological game, and a race against expectation inflation. And in the world of customer experience, managing expectations is just as important—maybe more so—than delivering excellence.
Good luck out there.
Amas Tenumah is
