How Amazon, Netflix, Apple And Ritz-Carlton Are Reshaping What People Expect From Every Organization They Touch
Ask a hospital administrator who their competition is and they will name other hospitals. Ask a bank the same question and they will name other banks. It is the most natural answer in the world and it has been wrong for longer than most leadership teams realize.
Customers do not sort their expectations by industry the way organizations sort their competitors by it. A patient does not arrive with a folder marked "healthcare expectations," separate from whatever they learned last week from a delivery app or a hotel check-in. They arrive with one continuous set of standards, built from whatever the best thing they encountered recently happened to be and they apply it indiscriminately to the hospital, to the bank, to the airport, to the government office, to you.
This is the part most benchmarking exercises miss entirely. The organization studying its nearest rivals is optimizing against a comparison the customer stopped making a long time ago. A 2025 consumer study by Five9, conducted with Zogby Analytics, put a number on it directly: consumers reported that they were no longer comparing businesses only within the same industry - they were comparing every interaction against the best one they'd had anywhere, regardless of sector. There is a name for the underlying mechanism: expectation transfer, the way a standard set in one context becomes, without anyone deciding it should, the baseline in an unrelated one.
What Happens Before They Walk Through Your Door
Consider the customer arriving at your organization this morning. Before they reached you, they may have ordered something from Amazon and watched every stage of its journey to their doorstep. They may have opened a ride-hailing app like Uber and watched a car approach in real time, down to the minute. They may have logged into Netflix, where the recommendations already reflected exactly what they wanted, without having to ask. They may have checked into a Ritz-Carlton, greeted by a member of staff who used their name before they had said a word.
None of that happened in your industry. All of it is now the standard they are measuring you against, whether you know it or not.
A patient enters a hospital carrying the memory of a frictionless airport transfer. A banking client brings instincts formed by Netflix, which seemed to understand them better than their own bank does. A citizen renewing a license brings the expectation of simplicity that Apple spent a decade training into them. None of these people reset their expectations at your door. They walk in already calibrated by somebody else's excellence.
Standards Migrate Whether You're Ready Or Not
This is the misconception sitting underneath most benchmarking exercises: the belief that a standard, once created, stays contained inside the industry that created it.
It doesn't.
The pattern shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. Ritz-Carlton never set out to compete with hospitals and yet healthcare organizations now find themselves measured against a standard of attentiveness a hotel chain established somewhere else entirely. Netflix never set out to compete with banks, but personalization has become a form of loyalty that a streaming platform taught customers to expect from every institution holding their money.
The same movement is happening across sectors that have nothing obvious in common. Apple has convinced citizens that simplicity is what a trustworthy government service looks like. Amazon has convinced telecom customers that visibility into a process is what reliability now means. Disney has convinced travelers that a queue can be part of the experience rather than an interruption of it. Spotify has convinced students that one curriculum was never going to fit everyone. Starlink has convinced shoppers that the experience shouldn't change depending on which store, or which country, they happen to be standing in.
None of these companies set out to compete with hospitals, banks, telecom providers, airports, universities, or retailers. They simply raised what people expect from every organization they interact with afterward and the organizations on the receiving end rarely notice until the comparison has already been made.
Raluca Berchiu, founder and CEO of CXM, has spent her career finding exactly where that migration begins and why so few organizations see it coming.
"People don't separate their experiences by industry. What feels considered in one place becomes expected in every other. That is how the standard moves and it moves whether organizations are ready for it or not."
Watch Raluca Berchiu on why your real competitors aren't who you think they are.
Your Real Competitor Isn't On Your Industry List
This changes one of the oldest habits in strategy. Executive teams spend months tracking what their direct competitors are doing, refining service levels against a shortlist of familiar rivals. Meanwhile, the customer standing in front of them isn't making that comparison at all. They're comparing today's interaction against the best experience they've had recently, regardless of where it happened.
This is a pattern CXM has traced repeatedly across engagements in the UAE, a market where an entire economy has effectively decided that good enough will not survive. Biometric systems move travelers through airports with barely a pause. A single government application resolves needs that would take weeks to sort out elsewhere. Hospitality coordination operates below conscious awareness, noticed only in its absence. The market functions as something close to a live test of what standards look like once they stop being aspirational and start being assumed and the bar keeps moving, sector by sector, faster than most benchmarking calendars can track.
Where Should Organizations Start Looking?
Berchiu describes it as two distinct stages and most organizations only ever reach the first one.
Stage one is fixing what's already costing the business. Mapping how customers actually move through an organization not how an org chart assumes they move and surfacing the friction accumulating in the space between departments that each look, individually, like they're performing well.
"Every function can point to measurable gains. But the experience customers encounter doesn't always reflect that. That's precisely why it goes unnoticed until it starts showing up somewhere that's harder to explain." By the time it reaches the numbers, the decision was already made. "In a moment nobody inside the organization thought to pay attention to," as she puts it.
Stage two is building what will set the organization apart. Deliberate, designed patterns in how people are received, guided through complexity and supported at the moments that matter most felt before they're ever named, recognizably consistent across every context in which someone encounters the brand.
"What made the experience acceptable is not what makes it stand out. There's a point where you stop asking how to serve better and start asking what an experience designed specifically around this customer would feel like, before they even had to ask for it."
The Next Advantage Comes From Outside Your Industry
The organizations pulling ahead right now are rarely the ones copying their nearest competitor more efficiently. They're the ones learning fastest from industries that have nothing to do with their own and increasingly, that's being run as a deliberate exercise rather than something that happens by accident. Healthcare has already shown what it looks like when a hospitality standard gets imported on purpose: NYU Langone Health's ambulatory network built a service framework it calls CARES, rolled out across patient access centers, billing operations and front-desk teams, after a multi-year partnership with a luxury hotel operator's training arm. The senior executive overseeing the initiative summed up the logic in one line: legendary service can take root anywhere, once an organization is willing to import it deliberately instead of inventing it from scratch.
That translation work identifying which outside industry has already solved the problem an organization keeps treating as unsolvable, then rebuilding it to fit that organization's own systems and people is exactly what CXM does across the sectors it works in. A telecom provider trying to solve reliability doesn't need to hire a logistics company; it needs the underlying idea of shipment visibility translated into the language of a repair ticket. A university trying to solve engagement doesn't need a streaming platform's engineering team; it needs the principle behind individualized recommendations translated into how a curriculum is built. A retailer trying to solve consistency doesn't need to become a satellite provider; it needs that same insistence on an identical experience translated into every store, regardless of geography.
The Gap Between Knowing And Doing
Most leadership teams already know experience matters. Few would argue otherwise in a strategy session. The distance that actually determines outcomes is the one between that belief and what customers encounter in practice. Bain & Company's research on this gap is now well known enough to have become a kind of industry punchline: roughly 80% of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience, while only about 8% of their customers agree with them. Salesforce's research points at a specific version of the same gap in its "State of the Connected Customer" study of over 14,000 consumers and business buyers about 79% of customers expected consistent interactions across departments, yet only 55% said it actually felt that way; the rest said it felt like dealing with separate companies stitched together under one name.
That's a small misalignment compounding across dozens of moments: between how the organization understands itself internally and how it actually reaches the person on the other end, between how fast a process moves and how cared for a person feels while moving through it, between one team's handoff and the next team's assumption about what already happened.
Closing that distance requires a kind of organizational honesty that's easier to postpone than to practice.
"If excellence is the standard in the organization, then it has to show up in the customer journey. Every time. That's not a CX initiative. That's a leadership decision."
What's Already At Stake
Expectations are rising across every sector at once and they're not slowing down to let any single industry catch its breath. The organizations still treating experience as a set of isolated touch-points will keep producing isolated results a better call center script here, a faster checkout there while the standard itself keeps moving somewhere else entirely.
The distance between the organizations that understand this and the ones still deciding whether it applies to them is not staying still either. It keeps widening, mostly in moments no leadership team is in the room to witness.
Customers were never comparing industries. They were comparing experiences the whole time. Every exceptional one they encounter resets the baseline for everyone who comes after - including you, whether you were paying attention or not.