Luxury retailers face a $213 billion crisis by failing basic customer experience standards, according to new Engine study

LONDON, June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Two-thirds of luxury brands are failing to meet basic customer experience standards, with 68% falling into the lowest Trust category, according to new research published today by CX design consultancy, Engine.

The study, which used predictive insights platform Adoreboard to analyse 19,344 customer reviews across 31 of the world's leading luxury brands, found the sector is losing trust at a rate that puts $213.56 billion at risk. The research identifies that for every dollar of revenue opportunity created by a good customer experience, a potential $9.43 is at risk due to poor customer service, after-sales returns or support issues as well as poor product quality.

Data scientists from Adoreboard used an approach known as Customer Revenue Impact to measure Trust across the end-to-end experience and convert it into financial impact. The findings point to a sector where the premium promise is not breaking down in the product but in the human moments that follow the sale, leading customers to disengage.

The top drivers of poor experience include customer service failures that expose $144.48 billion in at-risk revenue, after-sales support challenges that put $91.23 billion at risk, and concerns about product quality that account for $75.22 billion.

Hospitality expert Marco Nijhof, who has spent over three decades running five-star luxury hotel and retail operations across five continents, says the findings show the sector needs to recommit to customer experience excellence if it is to rebuild trust:

"AI increases the expectations of personalised experiences. AI creates these expectations by asking many different questions and providing various suggestions or recommendations. Now the expectations are high, the pressure on operations to deliver has only increased, and trust can be more easily hurt, as meeting those expectations has become more difficult. Trust goes out of the window."

The report provides a stark finding: just 26% of the 31 brands assessed achieved High Trust scores, while 68% were ranked Low Trust.

Oliver King, Managing Partner of Engine, said: "Luxury has always been built on how you make people feel. What this data shows is that feeling is being lost not in the product, but in every interaction after the sale. The brands that fix that consistently will own the competitive advantage for rebuilding trust."

The research identifies staff behaviour as the defining factor in both directions. Customers across some of the sector's most recognised names report being judged or ignored. At the same time, attentive and knowledgeable staff interactions produced the highest Trust score in the entire dataset, closely followed by personalised and bespoke experiences. Proof that when the human experience is protected, luxury delivers exactly what customers pay for.

The digital channels are performing worse, with 23% less Trust than in-store experiences. Nearly 1 in 7 of all consumer issues recorded in the study relate to digital failures, such as unanswered emails, failed deliveries, broken return portals and automated responses replacing human contact.

Full results of the report, including methodology, can be found here: https://hubs.ly/Q04kGz2X0.

About the Trust Gap Report: Luxury Retail

Published in June 2026 by Engine and Adoreboard, based on 19,344 customer reviews collected in May 2026 from Trustpilot and Google Reviews across 31 luxury brands. The sample exceeds the statistical threshold for 95% confidence at a margin of error of ±0.70%.

About the Trust Score

Created by data scientists at Adoreboard, the Trust Score measures the emotional intensity of customer feedback on a 0–100 scale. High Trust is defined as above 57.5, Medium Trust as 44–57.5, and Low Trust as below 44.

About Customer Revenue Impact (CRI)

A proprietary Adoreboard methodology that estimates at-risk revenue using a Weighted Risk Model. Inputs: average customer spend of $1,200, acquisition cost of $274, customer lifespan of 5.26 years, across an estimated combined global customer base of 271.6 million for a total of 31 luxury retail brands. Themes are not mutually exclusive: a single customer can be affected by more than one issue, so theme-level figures overlap and do not sum to the total "at risk" figure.

About Engine

Engine is a customer experience design consultancy that builds customer trust through human-centered experience design.

About Adoreboard

Adoreboard is the CX predictive intelligence platform that delivers Customer Revenue Impact (CRI). Using Emotion AI, the platform quantifies customer trust, surfaces hidden issues, and ranks them by financial exposure. CX leaders walk into board meetings with revenue numbers, not sentiment scores. From raw feedback to strategic narrative, in minutes. Adoreboard is a Queen's University Belfast spin-out and was selected by NVIDIA to present "Accelerated Speed to Insight" research at GTC 2026.