Setting the scene
A few messages and one rescheduled video call later, Pieter Honig appeared on my laptop from Barcelona. I connected from home in Eindhoven.
We had one problem: we could not hear each other. We changed settings, disconnected, reconnected and eventually found a setup that worked.
It was a fitting start to a conversation about customer experience. Both of us were present. The video looked fine. Our conversation was ready to travel, but the channel carrying it did not work.
Pieter’s work deals with a larger version of the same problem: how do you preserve the meaning of an experience as it moves from one customer to a global organization?
What he does
Pieter is VP Data and Analytics at CXG, a consultancy that helps luxury and premium brands understand and improve their customer experience.
They work with ~150 luxury brands across fashion, watches, jewellery, and automotive. Think designer bags, high-end watches and expensive sports cars—products where the experience around the purchase carries almost as much weight as the product itself.
Their research starts inside physical stores. CXG recruits mystery shoppers who enter a location as ordinary customers. Staff in the store do not know they are being assessed. Shopper looks around, asks questions, interacts with the staff, and afterwards completes an extensive survey about the experience.
Getting paid to shop at luxury brands sounds fun, but because of this recruiting people is harder than it sounds. Imagine receiving a message offering to pay you to walk into a luxury watch store and report back afterwards. This quickly sounds like a scam.
Word of mouth therefore works best. Someone completes an assignment, and introduces someone else.
The individual visit may be small, but the information eventually feeds into around >1000 reports annually. Pieter’s role is to turn those separate experiences into something companies can understand and act on.
What we talked about
Customer experience does not travel automatically
A customer experience cannot simply be copied from Paris, to Dubai, Shanghai, or São Paulo.
The logo may be the same. The interior may follow the same guidelines. The products are the same. But customers bring different expectations about hospitality, expertise, status, personal attention, and service.
What feels friendly in one country may feel intrusive in another. What appears professional in one country may come across as distant somewhere else.
Pieter recalled a store where staff started theatrical tricks and juggling products. They were clearly trying to create a memorable experience, but it was not necessarily the experience the brand wanted to communicate.
Effort alone does not create consistency. A global brand needs to remain recognizable, but its customer experience also needs to work locally. Standardizing everything ignores cultural differences. Localizing everything risks making the brand lose its core.
Brands have to operate between those two extremes. CXG enables them to do this.
When 60% beats 85%
A similar translation problem appears in the data. Imagine receiving a customer-satisfaction score of 60%. It sounds mediocre. Now imagine receiving 85%. That sounds much better. But according to the benchmarks Pieter works with, the numbers alone say surprisingly little.
In Japan, a customer-satisfaction score of around 60% can represent strong performance. In Korea, the average can be closer to 85%.
A Korean store scoring 85% may therefore perform around the market average, while a Japanese store scoring 60% could be one of the strongest performers in its category.
The lower number can indicate the better result.
CXG asks many questions after each mystery-shopping visit. Around 25 remain consistent, creating a foundation for comparisons across brands, stores, countries, and time.
This benchmark translates the score back into its context.
Without it, a number can appear precise while remaining almost meaningless. It may fit neatly into a presentation and move up or down from one year to the next, but it cannot answer the question that matters:
What is good enough?
The benchmark became the product
Once the benchmark gave brands a way to understand their performance, it also created another opportunity: making that comparison valuable enough to return to.
CXG created a ranking for the strongest-performing brands. Only brands in the top 5 can see it, and participation meant accepting that the other participating brands could also see their position. It created a simple tension: every brand wanted visibility, but gaining it required accepting visibility.
Over time, companies began using their position as an internal KPI. Some set explicit targets to reach the top 3. So no longer is CXG’s work an occasional piece of research. It has become part of how clients set goals and measure progress.
A single report provides a snapshot. Repeated measurement reveals whether the organization is moving. The benchmark became the product.
But knowing where you stand is still different from knowing what to improve.
From experience to action
That is where CXG’s 5 critical moments in the customer journey come in. They help reveal where an experience works and where it breaks down.
A total score hides those differences.
One brand may be particularly good at making customers dream. Another may make them feel immediately at home.
Neither brand is simply good or bad. They create value in different parts of the experience.
This makes the findings more useful. Instead of only telling a company that its overall score needs to improve, CXG can show where to focus.
They go one step further by turning those findings into educational and training tools for store employees. This shifts the product from simply showing where a brand stands to helping it get where it wants to be.
At that point, the benchmark becomes more than a ranking. It becomes part of a system that turns insight into action and carries the intended experience into the store.
Living between contexts
The importance of context does not stop at Pieter’s work. It also shapes how he lives and sees the world.
Dubai is his employer base, but he regularly spends several months working from other countries. Over the years, that has taken him through places including Australia, Japan, Spain, South Africa, Vietnam, Kenya and Morocco.
What interested me was not the digital-nomad lifestyle itself, but what repeatedly changing environments did to his assumptions.
Living elsewhere made him notice things about the Netherlands that are difficult to see when you have nothing to compare them with.
Take something as simple as making friends.
In the Netherlands, when two people arrange to have a drink, adding someone else often requires permission: “Do you mind if my friend joins?”
In Spain, Pieter said, someone might simply bring their neighbor. No announcement or approval needed. They just bring them along.
If you have never experienced anything else, the Dutch way feels completely normal. Of course you ask before bringing someone along. Who just randomly shows up with their neighbour?
Well, in Spain, apparently, people do. And once you experience it, it does not feel strange at all. It can actually be refreshing. Social circles stay more open, introductions happen naturally, and meeting new people requires less planning.
What once seemed like the logical way of doing things suddenly becomes just one way of doing things.
That is what connects Pieter’s life back to his work. CXG gives brands a benchmark that helps them understand what “good” means in different markets. Moving between countries has done something similar for Pieter personally.
Living abroad gave him a benchmark for home.
Reflections
Outcomes over output
CXG made me think about a simple product trap: confusing what you deliver with what people actually want.
A report is not the outcome.
A benchmark is not the outcome.
Even knowing you are #7 is not the outcome.
The customer wants to get better.
That is where CXG gets interesting. They do not stop at measurement. They show brands where the experience breaks, help train the people delivering it, and then measure again.
It is easy to obsess over the feature, dashboard, analysis, or report. But the better question is simpler: What is the customer actually trying to achieve?
You need another reference point
Pieter made me think about how quickly “normal” becomes confused with “good.”
If you have only lived in the Netherlands, Dutch ways of working, planning, and socializing feel completely logical. Not because they are objectively best, but because they are your reference point.
Pieter gets to challenge that constantly by moving between countries.
The more useful takeaway for me is to deliberately seek different reference points. Work with people from another culture. Spend more time somewhere unfamiliar. Enter an industry, team, or environment that operates differently.
You may come back thinking your original way was better. Or you may discover something you never thought to question.
Either way, you have a better benchmark.