The expectation experience gap: Why product marketing managers need a better survey approach

Expectations might be tied to past experience with your brand

Your customer's last interaction with support, product interface, onboarding experience becomes the reference point for the next one. A single strong or weak moment can recalibrate expectations across the entire experience.

Expectation might be relative to what your competitors deliver

Your product isn’t evaluated in isolation. Customers compare your experience to alternatives they’ve tried, researched, or even heard about. As competitors raise the bar, so do expectations.

Expectations evolve with changing industry norms and consumer behavior

What felt acceptable a year ago may feel slow, clunky, or outdated today. Expectations evolve alongside technology, workflows, and the customer's lifestyle.

The takeaway here is simple: expectation is a moving variable. But what does this mean for how PMMs and CX teams design surveys?

A useful survey framework needs to account for both sides of the equation: What customers experienced, and what they expected going in (based on memory, comparison, and context). Incorporating expectation alongside experience is what allows teams to spot perception shifts early, interpret scores correctly, and understand whether they’re falling short or simply being measured against a higher bar.

1.Focus on expectation management as part of the experience

Expectation are shaped at every touchpoint. Right from the very first sales call to the relationship you maintain post purchase, ensure the messaging, brand voice, and services have a consistent tone and the communication is clear and transparent.

How do you achieve this. Simple. Deploy surveys across all touchpoints. Insights from each touchpoint reveals where you're hitting the nail and where you need rethinking.

A quick note: In practice, product experience and customer experience are often discussed as distinct but complementary ideas. Product experience refers to how customers interact with the product itself — its interface, workflows, features, performance, and usability. Customer experience, on the other hand, includes everything around it: onboarding, support interactions, communication, and the broader relationship with the brand. For example, the survey questions you ask after the demo captures the product experience and the questions you ask about the onboarding experience paints the picture of customer experience.

What they experience is the sum of all of it. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll refer to this combined view as the overall experience.

2.Pay attention to qualitative signals

Open-ended responses might be the gold-dust you're ignoring. They surface early warning signs: hesitation and conditional praises, that don’t immediately show up in CSAT or NPS.

Don't just ask them about the experience. Go a step further and ask them if the experience was above or below their expectations and ask them to elaborate on it with an open ended question.These qualitative signals are easy to overlook when scores appear “fine,” but they’re often where expectation gaps first appear. Pairing quantitative and qualitative questions would give you a holistic view of what's happening.

Read more on how to use open ended feedback to create clear action plans

3.Run longitudinal research

Because expectations evolve, surveys cannot be treated as one-off exercises.

Running surveys longitudinally allows teams to observe how perceptions shift even when the product remains unchanged. Watching trends across NPS, CES, and other KPIs over time helps observe moving goalposts.

4.Run competitive analysis

You might be doing well, but customers are often comparing you to something else entirely. A smoother signup elsewhere. Faster support. Clearer communication.
Asking what other options they’ve tried and what stood out reveals how expectations are being shaped in the industry and what you can do to have an edge.