Executives Think Customers Trust Them. They Don't.
Ninety percent of business executives believe customers highly trust their company. Only 30% of customers actually do. That 60-point gap, from PwC's Trust in US Business Survey, has been widening every year it's been measured.
This isn't a one-off finding. Every major study that asks both sides the same question finds the same pattern: companies believe they're closer to their customers than they are.
The gap, by the numbers
| Study | What it measured | The gap |
|---|---|---|
| PwC Trust in US Business Survey | Executives who think customers highly trust their company vs. customers who say they do | 90% vs. 30% (a 60-point gap, up from 57 in the two prior years) |
| PwC 2025 Customer Experience Survey | Executives who say customer loyalty has grown vs. consumers who agree | ~90% vs. 40% |
| Forrester Brand Experience Index | Customer vs. noncustomer perception of the same brand | 5 to 30 points, depending on industry and region |
Forrester's version of the gap works a little differently; it compares how a brand's existing customers see it against how people who've never bought from it see the same brand. But the underlying story matches PwC's: the people inside a company, and the people who already like the company, both see it more favorably than the people who don't yet have a reason to.
Why the gap keeps growing
None of this is executives lying to themselves on purpose. It's a measurement problem. PwC's researchers found that most companies that say they track trust are actually tracking something adjacent to it, like CSAT or NPS. Those numbers are related to trust. They aren't the same thing.
CSAT tells you if someone was happy with one interaction. NPS tells you if someone would recommend you to a friend. Neither one asks the question that actually predicts whether a customer sticks around when something goes wrong: do they believe you'll come through for them next time?
Trust is what's left when you strip out the interaction that just happened and ask about the relationship. Most companies don't have a number for that, so they default to the number they do have and assume it's close enough.
Where the gap actually gets built
The PwC 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that 29% of consumers stopped buying from a brand specifically because of a bad customer experience, separate from a bad product. That's not one dramatic failure. It's an accumulation of small moments where the company didn't show up the way it said it would.
A support search that comes back empty. A chatbot that gives a confident wrong answer. A customer effort score that keeps climbing because every issue takes three tries to resolve. Each one is small. Customers remember the pattern, not the individual event.
That pattern shows up again in how consumers feel about AI specifically. The same PwC survey found that 58% of consumers are only somewhat or not at all comfortable using AI tools to engage with brands. People aren't rejecting AI on principle. They're reacting to the version of AI that guesses instead of knowing, the one built on a knowledge base nobody's kept current. Get an AI-driven answer wrong once, and it costs more trust than a slow human ever would.
Closing the gap starts with measuring the right thing
The fix isn't a bigger CSAT number. It's building a system where the answer a customer gets is the one you'd actually stand behind, every time, whether a human gives it or an AI agent does.
That means treating your knowledge base as the thing customers actually judge you on, not a back-office reference doc. It means the AI answering a question at 9pm is drawing from the same verified source your best support rep would use, not improvising. Teams further along this path, using frameworks like the 5 levels of AI maturity in customer service, already know the jump from "answers tickets" to "customers trust the answer" isn't a tooling upgrade. It's a decision to make the knowledge underneath everything accurate first.
The companies closing this gap aren't the ones with the most confident brand messaging. They're the ones whose customers, when asked directly, say the company actually does what it claims. That's a much harder number to fake, and a much better one to chase.
If you want to see what a verified, consistently accurate knowledge base looks like in practice, see how Helpfeel works.