June 11, 2026
Trust Leaves Luxury Brands the Moment the Human Touch Does
Luxury sells more than product. Customers pay a premium for the craft, the care and the confidence that someone will look after them long after they leave the store. New research from CX design consultancy Engine finds that too many brands are no longer delivering it.
Engine’s Trust Gap Report analysed almost 20,000 customer reviews across 31 of the world’s leading luxury brands using the predictive insights platform Adoreboard. The work puts $213.56 billion in sector revenue at risk due to trust crisis. For every dollar of revenue opportunity, a potential $9.43 hangs in the balance through lost loyalty.
Where Trust Erodes
The premium promise does not break in the product. It breaks in the human moments that follow the sale. Customer service failings account for half of all negative feedback and carry $144.48 billion in revenue exposure on their own. Returns and after-sales support carry a further $91.23 billion, and product quality another $75.22 billion. Engine notes these themes overlap, so they should not be added together.
A little under 30% of the 31 names assessed earned High Trust scores, while 68% landed in the lowest trust band.
Marco Nijhof, a hospitality expert who has spent over three decades running five-star luxury hotel and retail operations across five continents, said the sector needs to recommit to customer experience excellence to rebuild trust.
“AI increases the expectations of personalised experiences,” Nijhof said. “The expectation is created by the AI through asking many different questions and providing different suggestions and recommendations. Now the expectations are high, and the pressure on the operations to deliver has only increased, and trust can be more easily hurt right now, as the delivery of the expectation has become more difficult to produce. Trust goes out of the window.”
That tension runs through current CX thinking, where the stronger argument holds that AI works best when it supports human-led service rather than replacing it.
Online, Trust Falls Furthest
Trust erodes fastest where brands strip the human element out of the experience. Engine found digital channels performing 23% below in-store experiences on trust. Many consumer recorded in the study trace to digital failures, from unanswered emails and failed deliveries to broken return portals and automated replies standing in for human contact.
The finding echoes earlier research showing that executives rate their automated service far higher than customers actually do.
Oliver King, Managing Partner of Engine, said the loss happens in the interactions, not the merchandise. He 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 Human Fix
Staff behaviour decides the outcome in both directions. Customers across some of the sector’s most recognised names report being judged or ignored. Yet attentive, knowledgeable staff produced the highest trust score in the entire dataset, followed by personalised and bespoke service. When brands protect the human experience, luxury delivers what customers pay for.
The question for every luxury house now is where its own experience builds trust, and where it quietly loses it.
