Customer perception: Definition, importance + how to improve it

Customer perception is customers’ opinions, feelings, and beliefs about your brand. Here’s how to build, improve, and influence it.

Customer perception is often difficult to understand because it’s subjective and varies from buyer to buyer. But this ambiguity doesn’t mean you should ignore your customers’ opinions—after all, they determine whether they continue doing business with you.

According to Zendesk Benchmark data, 50 percent of consumers would switch to a competitor after just one bad experience with a brand. To create and maintain positive customer perception, you have to offer an exceptional customer experience (CX) and form a connection with buyers at every stage of the customer journey. Below, we dive into how to measure and improve customer perception so you can boost revenue and build long-term relationships.

Why is customer perception important?

Customer perception is crucial because it influences buying decisions, impacts brand loyalty, and ultimately affects your bottom line.

Imagine a customer becomes frustrated with your brand and cancels their subscription. While it may seem like a small loss, that customer could have been an upsell or cross-sell opportunity, a loyal advocate, or someone who recommended your product to their friends.

Beyond the above, customer perception can also influence many factors like:

• Brand image: Many consumers love to share their experiences—both positive and negative—with people in their network. Establishing a positive customer perception can drive word-of-mouth business to your brand.
• Purchasing decisions: A superior product or an unbeatable price doesn’t always guarantee success. The service you provide and how you treat customers is also critical. In fact, Zendesk Benchmark data shows that 60 percent of consumers have purchased from a brand solely based on the service they expect to receive.
• Customer loyalty: Businesses can foster positive customer perception by enhancing their CX—a strategy that can foster loyalty. According to Zendesk Benchmark data, 3 in 4 customers will spend more with businesses that provide a good CX.

Once you realize how much impact a single customer can have on your bottom line, their perception of your company will seem like anything but a small matter.

What influences customer perception?

Customer perception is influenced by both direct and indirect interactions with your business. Some of them include:

• Customer experience: The quality of your customer service, ease of interactions, and overall satisfaction with your products or services can leave a lasting impression on perception and customer retention.
• Social media: Your brand’s presence on social media platforms—and how consumers interact with your page—can impact how customers perceive your authenticity and relatability.
• Online reviews: Consumers often turn to reviews before making a purchase. Having highly positive or negative reviews can easily sway a potential customer.
• Pricing: If your pricing and the customer’s perceived value of your product don’t align, they could develop a negative perception of your business without even becoming a customer.
• Past experiences: Previous interactions with your business, whether good or bad, can directly shape customer perceptions and future buying decisions.
• Word-of-mouth: Recommendations from friends, family, or influencers significantly affect customer perception and buying decisions.

While you can’t control every factor, focusing on what you can—such as delivering a positive customer experience—can positively influence other aspects of perception.

4 ways to improve customer perception

You need a game plan to help you improve if your customers don’t view you positively. And if you find your company has a great reputation, don’t rest on your laurels—you’ll need to take steps to continue maintaining that standard.

1. Provide stellar customer support

No matter your goals, your business can’t settle for a mediocre or poor customer service operation. Strengthen your customer support with a combination of tactics:

• Provide self-service options: Helpful resources like knowledge bases or FAQ pages can help your customers resolve their problems independently, allowing them to get answers faster.
• Invest in omnichannel support: An omnichannel support solution like Zendesk can help you meet your customers where they are and deliver effective support on their preferred channels.
• Embrace AI and automation: AI tools like Zendesk AI agents can help you automate customer service interactions. These advanced chatbots can integrate with your backend systems to handle customer interactions from start to finish—things like updating account information, giving order status updates, modifying reservations, surfacing helpful articles, and more.

When you commit to delivering stellar support, a positive customer perception isn’t far behind.

2. Share customer success stories

An effective way to influence customers’ opinions about your brand is to show them how you’ve helped others succeed. Customers who see how others have achieved their goals with your product or service are more likely to perceive your brand positively.

At Zendesk, for example, we routinely reach out to our customers and ask them how our product has helped them. Then, we share those testimonials on sales calls with potential customers and in newsletters to existing customers.

3. Encourage company-wide collaboration

The customer support team isn’t solely responsible for keeping customers happy—every department needs to work together toward this objective.

A simple way to streamline your internal operations and improve team collaboration is to use a customer relationship management (CRM) system. CRMs gather information about how a customer interacts with a company and centralize that data in one main database. They also integrate with other customer-facing tools and make it easy to share customer details with each team that directly connects with consumers, including sales, marketing, and support.

4. Support social causes

Today’s consumers want brands to take a stance. According to Zendesk Benchmark data, 63 percent of customers want to buy from socially responsible companies, and 54 percent want to buy from companies prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion in their communities and workplaces.

You can foster corporate social responsibility by first polling your employees and customers about what matters most to them. Then, look for local charities aligning with those issues and set up work days for team members to volunteer there.

How to identify and measure customer perception

As much as you’d like to think all your customers love your brand, you can’t rely on this assumption. Instead, gauge customer perception by tracking customer feedback using the following methods.

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys

Customer satisfaction score is a customer service key performance indicator (KPI) that gauges how happy consumers are with a purchase or interaction. Reviewing the ratings and accompanying comments can show you what your customers are thinking and feeling.

When creating your surveys, consider open-ended questions that clarify the reasoning behind their responses:

• “Why did you choose this score?”

• “What could we do to improve your experience?”

• “Where did this interaction succeed or fail at meeting your expectations?”

According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2025, CX Trendsetters—business leaders who have fully embraced AI—believe that customer satisfaction is the second most important priority in the coming year. This shows the importance of prioritizing CSAT to improve your processes and customer perception.

Net Promoter Score® (NPS)

Net Promoter Score is a tool for measuring how likely your customers are to recommend your business to others. NPS is less transactional than CSAT and focuses on the way your customers feel about your brand rather than how they feel about their recent customer service experience.

But similar to a CSAT survey, your NPS survey will be especially insightful if it includes additional open-ended questions such as:

• “What was disappointing about your experience with our product/service?”

• “What features of our product/service do you like best?”

• “How can we improve your experience?”

Based on their responses, you can determine what steps you need to take to change negative perceptions and convince customers to advocate for your brand. To ensure you’re accurately gauging customer sentiment, conduct NPS surveys no more than every six months.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score measures how easy (or difficult) it is for customers to solve their issues or to complete a task using your product or service. Ideally, you want buyers to get the resolution they need with little effort.

Include questions like:

• “What was the most time-consuming part of your experience?”

• “Was it easy and convenient to contact the support team?”

This line of questioning helps you gauge how much effort your customers are putting into interacting with your brand. The responses can help indicate what you need to do to improve, too.

Review customer feedback

When consumers feel strongly about a company or interaction, they often make their voices heard online. You should take time to search for this feedback across social media and review websites.

Monitor your official page on social media while searching for brand mentions or relevant hashtags that may relate to your business to get a full picture of customer sentiment. On other platforms, monitor Google reviews and review websites like G2 or Capterra. When combined, this feedback can help you identify insights you may not have found with surveys alone.

Liberty London

Liberty sees Zendesk AI as key to delivering personalized service

“Liberty is all about delivering a personal service. I see AI enhancing that personal service because now our customers will be interacting with a human who’s being put in front of them at the right time with the right information.”

Ian Hunt

Director of Customer Services

Read customer story

Improve customer perception with Zendesk

Customer perception influences many important aspects, like how profitable you are and how easily you can build long-term relationships. You should always prioritize your perception and emphasize ways of improving it—and to aid your efforts, consider partnering with a CX expert like Zendesk. Zendesk customer service software can help you create meaningful connections with your customers, scale your service offering, stay flexible through change, and bolster your customer perception.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.