78% of Businesses Think They've Nailed Customer Experience. Their Customers Disagree.

78% of businesses believe they deliver a connected, engaged customer experience. Only 25% of their customers agree.^[1]

That gap shows up again and again in the research, from Bain to Capgemini to SAP's 2026 Global Engagement Index. It's one of the most expensive misunderstandings in business.

I think I know why it exists, because I've spent nearly thirty years working on the other side of it.

I'm Becky Hirst, a community engagement strategist and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, recognised for my work in community participation and social inclusion across Australia and the UK. I wrote For the Love of Community Engagement, a #1 Amazon Australia bestseller in its category. I've recorded more than fifty episodes of a podcast of the same name, and my next book, Have Your Say, is on its way. For three decades my job has been helping organisations genuinely engage the people affected by their decisions. That doesn't mean informing them after the fact, or surveying them and quietly filing the results. It means actually sharing influence with them.

Here's what I've come to realise. What works in communities also works with customers. We've just never properly carried it across.

Experience is what you design. Engagement is what they feel.

Businesses have poured enormous effort into customer experience: the journeys, the touchpoints, the personalisation, and now the AI layer. But experience is largely the organisation's view of itself, the thing it designed. Engagement is different. Engagement is the two-way relationship. It's whether the customer actually participates, feels heard, and chooses to come back.

The 2026 trend data shows the market waking up to this. The language is shifting from "personalisation" to "authenticity" and honest, human engagement. Customers can tell the difference between being marketed at and being listened to. The businesses that close the gap won't be the ones with the cleverest automation. They'll be the ones that treat engagement as a relationship to deepen, not a campaign to optimise.

Introducing the Continuum of Customer Engagement

In community engagement we have well-established models for depth of involvement. None of them transplant neatly into a commercial setting. A business can't hand its customers decisions about pricing or strategy the way a council shares a planning decision with its community. So we built our own.

The Continuum of Customer Engagement doesn't measure influence over the boardroom. It measures depth of relationship, and with it trust, buy-in and belonging.

The Continuum of Customer Engagement, increasing depth of relationship from Transact to Belong

Stage	What it is	What it looks like
Transact	A pure exchange. No relationship. You're interchangeable.	A vending machine, a toll road, the petrol station you stop at only because it's there, a parking app you'll never think about again.
Inform	You tell them what you're doing. One-way.	Price-change emails, product announcements, updated terms, the FAQ page.
Listen	You seek their view, but the decision stays yours.	Surveys, reviews, feedback forms, NPS, social listening. The customer speaks, but rarely hears back.
Involve	You spend time in their world. Their experience shapes your decisions.	Watching customers use your product, working the counter, joining their events, conversations without a script.
Co-create	You build it together. Customers help decide what it becomes.	Customers on the design team, testing and refining ideas together, features customers helped create.
Belong	The customer is part of the community around your business: advocate, insider, family.	Brands people put on a bumper sticker or a tattoo, member-owned co-ops, loyal regulars who defend you unprompted and bring their friends.

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This is a first draft of the Continuum (as at 14 October 2026) and may evolve as we gather feedback from customer experience and engagement professionals. Any updates will be posted to www.fixthesystem.world.

Notice what happens as you move along the continuum: the effort flips. At Transact and Inform, the business does all the work and all the talking. By Belong, your customers are doing the advocating for you. That's the return on genuine engagement, and it's exactly what the 78% who think they're already there have missed.

Where most businesses actually sit

Most businesses live at Inform and mistake it for engagement. They broadcast, they survey, and they wonder why loyalty is thin. The answer isn't to leap straight to Belong. It's to honestly locate where you are, then take the next step along the continuum on purpose.

Why this matters to us

This is the work my business partner Karen Cocks and I are building FTS. around. Our mission is to make systems work for the people they exist to serve. I work from the outside in, with customers, communities and families. Karen works from the inside out, with leaders, culture and people. The Continuum sits right at the start of our EVA method: we Engage on the symptom, Validate the cause, and Adapt the system.

Because we fix the system, not the people.

Becky Hirst, FTS.