Customer experience in India has entered a new phase of accountability. At the launch of the Havas CX's X Index 2025 India Report, one theme cut through the data and discourse: the growing cost of the gap between what brands promise and what they actually deliver.

For the second consecutive year, Tata Motors topped the X Index India rankings, underscoring the competitive advantage of consistent execution across the customer journey. The Tata Group’s broader presence in the top 10, with Tata CLiQ Luxury and Taj Hotels also featuring prominently, signals how CX-led cultures scale across categories.

The rest of the top 10 includes brands across categories such as automotive, technology, financial services, hospitality, banking, and fashion, namely: OnePlus, Mahindra, Zerodha, Apple, JBL, Hyatt, and HDFC. The list reflects a mix of legacy players and newer brands that have managed to keep 'CX debt' - the accumulated impact of small, repeated experience failures that quietly erode customer trust and loyalty- in check.

In a chat with Manifest on the sidelines of the report launch, David Shulman, global CEO, Havas CX Network, said that the India findings largely reinforced global patterns rather than disrupting them.

“We did not see any major distinctions market by market that stood out. Across the board, the brands that are doing well are raising the bar, forcing everyone else to catch up,” he noted, adding, “With that, expectations of customer experiences also continue to rise."

"Universally, we see that whenever a category is disrupted, expectations rise immediately, even for brands that have been leading," he said.

Asked what stood out most sharply across markets, Shulman pointed to a familiar but increasingly unforgiving gap. 
“Across markets, we see trust being earned, or lost, through everyday interactions. The biggest factor that we're seeing is that brands need to be very careful when they communicate things or when they're advertising that they deliver on those promises, because customers are really paying attention.”

When the experience doesn’t match what was promised, expectations are higher, and satisfaction is lower. That gap is where CX debt builds, he explained.

“And there’s nothing more upsetting than engaging with a brand - whether by shopping in-store or online - looking for or expecting something the brand has communicated and not getting it. When that happens, expectations are high, but the experience falls short. That, for me, is the number one message: brands should 'walk the talk' when it comes to communicating high expectations and delivering on them, he emphasised.

On whether marketers are over-investing in top-of-funnel visibility at the cost of post-purchase experiences, Shulman acknowledged the problem while framing brand building as a ‘balance’ issue.

“Many times, brands need to find a balance in that. To me, brand value is built on having a brand stand for something, communicate it, and then deliver it. I look at it as a three-legged stool. If one leg is broken or weak, it all falls over,” he stressed.

Experience has increasingly become the most fragile, yet most important, piece in the brand puzzle, according to him.

Looking ahead, he flagged cautious optimism around AI-led customer experience, referring to it as the “one CX capability that will most clearly separate winning brands from the rest” in the coming years.

“Brands will look for ways to utilise AI and technology to streamline operations, reduce costs, and create efficiencies in the near future. However, if it is used only to serve the brand’s purposes while failing to meet customer needs, it risks widening the CX gap again,” he cautioned.

Technology, while being driven to create cost savings for brands, should also focus on improving customer experience by being designed around real user needs. “That’s something we will all have to pay attention to in the coming years,” he added.

Now in its seventh year globally, the X Index is Havas CX’s proprietary customer experience barometer, spanning 59,000 consumers across eight global markets and evaluating 580 brands, on 19 metrics spanning four key dimensions: Functional, Emotional, Personal, and Collective. It examined experiences across bricks-and-clicks brands as well as digital-first players, and included a comprehensive scorecard evaluating touchpoints across the customer journey, from social media interactions to after-sales service.

The India chapter of the 2025 report assessed 47 brands across eight categories, including banking, automobiles, hospitality, fashion and luxury, e-retail, technology, and financial services.

Key insights from the report:

From personalisation to proof

A key shift identified in the 2025 report is the evolution of consumer expectations. Indian consumers feel the CX gap more sharply than many global peers, the report noted. While earlier CX strategies leaned heavily on personalisation and contextual relevance, Indian consumers today demonstrate a sharper, more discerning approach to brand choice. Inconsistent execution, delayed responses, broken digital journeys, and unclear communication quickly accumulate as experience debt. Crucially, customers rarely complain. They simply switch brands. Exposure to best-in-class experiences, often delivered by disruptors, has reset benchmarks across categories. 

Introducing the ‘Proof Stack’

To address this widening gap, the X Index 2025 introduces the Proof Stack, a three-layer framework through which consumers now validate brand experiences:
•    Proof of seamless Experience: Consistency across touchpoints, powered by shared intelligence.
•    Proof of emotion: Confidence and reassurance delivered operationally, not just through storytelling.
•    Proof of performance: Technology-led excellence that meets, and increasingly anticipates, rising expectations.
The implication is clear: experience is no longer a soft metric. It is a measurable, compounding asset or liability.

The takeaway

The X Index 2025 makes one thing unambiguous: experience is now a real-time test of credibility. In a market moving as fast as India, brands are no longer judged by intent or innovation alone, but by the cumulative quality of everyday interactions. Those that fail to close the CX gap risk losing customers quietly but steadily.