An eatery, a cafe is still compared with another eatery or a cafe. An airline with another airline, a dry cleaner with the one down the road. Guess what…that hasn’t changed. What has changed is what happens after that comparison.
A customer may choose one restaurant because the food is better, another because it delivers faster. They may pick an airline for its schedule but expect the booking experience to be as simple as ordering something online. They may choose a dry cleaner for the quality of its work and still wonder why getting an update about a garment isn’t as easy as tracking a parcel. That comparison within the category remains. However, another comparison has arrived alongside it. Customers now carry their best experiences with them.
A company doesn’t get to decide which businesses it is being compared with. Its customers do. That matters because a good experience in one part of life quietly raises the standard somewhere else. Once you have tracked a parcel to your doorstep, “It’s on the way” feels vague. Once you’ve changed a booking in seconds, a phone call for the same task feels unnecessarily difficult. Once a business remembers your preferences, being asked for the same information again feels like a memory failure.
None of these expectations were created by the industry being judged. They were created somewhere else, and they travel.
A 2026 global study by the Genesys, based on responses from 5,811 consumers across markets, found that 92% want companies to match the best experience they’ve ever had. That is a striking shift in the way the customer sets the benchmark. What’s easy to miss in that number is the word “ever.” Not “best in the category,” not “best this year” — ever. So the bar isn’t your last decent meal out or the last flight that left on time. It’s whatever the single best experience sitting in someone’s memory happens to be, pulled from anywhere. And that’s awkward for a business, because none of that memory shows up in what the customer actually sees. They don’t see the systems, the staffing, the supplier who didn’t deliver on time and got fixed quietly before anyone noticed. They just see whether the thing worked.
A clean garment arrives when promised, a meal arrives as expected, and a flight leaves on time. An order can be followed without having to call anyone. Behind each of those moments is a different operation, with its own people, equipment, suppliers, regulations, resource demands and points of failures. The customer sees the final few minutes. The business has to get everything before those minutes impeccably right. This is where “average” starts to lose its usefulness, and it’s not because customers stop comparing businesses within industries, they don’t. It is actually because those comparisons now sit alongside a much harder question: “Why can’t this be as easy as something else I already use?” that question is being asked quietly, thousands times a day, and it is changing the standard businesses have to meet.
