What Customers Say vs. What They Do

If your organization has ever launched a new feature or service that customers claimed to have wanted, only to see limited adoption, you’ve encountered a common challenge in customer research: the gap between stated intent and actual behavior.

Why Customer Feedback Doesn’t Always Reflect True Intent

It’s not dishonesty, but rather due to the fact that human behavior is influenced by a mix of emotion, context, memory, and subconscious drivers. When we ask customers what they want, what they value, or what they would do in a hypothetical situation, they answer from a place of intention, not reality.

Some reasons for this gap include:

1. Memory and recall limitations: Customers may not remember experiences accurately, and typically recall negative moments more strongly than positive ones. This negativity bias can distort how they report past interactions.
2. Social desirability bias: Customers might give an answer they think is most acceptable or expected even if their true preference differs, conveying how they hope to be perceived.
3. Hypothetical thinking: When asked what they would do, customers often respond based on an idealized scenario, without accounting for the real-time constraints or emotions they would actually experience.

Behavior Tells a Different Story

While self-reported data shows customer opinion, behavior uncovers the truth.

What customers do during an actual journey – what they click, how long they stay, where they abandon, what they repurchase – reveals more than static survey responses. This is known as revealed preference, and it’s a powerful indicator of what truly drives decision-making.

Companies that monitor behavior alongside feedback gain a clearer, more accurate picture of:

• Hidden pain points
• Overlooked bottlenecks
• Subconscious motivators
• Hard-to-express needs

Behavioral research uncovers the underlying reasons behind customer actions, the true drivers of loyalty, satisfaction, and conversion.

Assumptions alone can only take you so far; customer feedback proposes a hypothesis, behavior validates it.

Survey Blindspots

Surveys and interviews are valuable tools, but they have limits. When used as the sole source of customer insight, they can create misleading conclusions.

Common blind spots include:

• Overestimating interest in a feature that customers say they want
• Misjudging willingness to pay based on hypothetical answers
• Identifying surface-level issues instead of root causes
• Building roadmaps around intention instead of actual usage

Organizations that rely exclusively on stated data often invest in the wrong priorities.

Where Feedback Meets Reality

A modern customer research strategy combines attitudinal and behavioral data to give a complete view of the customer. Attitudinal data captures what customers say through surveys, interviews, focus groups, feedback forms, and NPS comments, revealing their perceptions, preferences, and motivations. Behavioral data, in contrast, shows what customers actually do, through web and app analytics, journey mapping, observational studies, A/B testing, purchase patterns, and clickstream analysis.

When these two types of data intersect, the result is a complete, 360° understanding of customer behavior.

This combination allows businesses to:

• Identify gaps between expectation and reality
• Uncover true needs and motivations
• Prioritize improvements that actually move the needle
• Build intuitive, frictionless experiences

Why This is Critical for Business Success

Understanding the difference between what customers say and what they do is more than a research principle; it’s a necessity.

Organizations that unify expressed opinions and real-world actions can make smarter decisions, reduce wasted investment, improve product-market fit, increase retention and loyalty, and tailor experiences to what truly matters. This integrated approach turns insights into action that drives measurable growth.

 

 

Alexa Vainstein, Senior Analyst