Customer experience is where international expansion succeeds or fails

Enterprises can enter a new market with a strong growth plan and still leave customers with an experience shaped somewhere else. Drawing on new research and insights from leaders at AWS, Monzo, and The Culture Factor Group, this article looks at why customer experience is becoming the clearest measure of whether market expansion is working.

Most companies enter a new market believing they understand the customer they want to reach. The opportunity has been assessed and the business has committed to growth, yet many of the decisions that shape the eventual customer experience were made much earlier, often with the home market firmly in mind.

Customers can feel the difference. They encounter a brand through its website, product, support, campaigns, and increasingly through AI tools that interpret the company on their behalf. When those interactions carry assumptions from somewhere else, the experience can be polished and accurate while still feeling unfamiliar.

The global content disconnect report is based on an independent survey of 550 senior business leaders across nine countries. Half said disconnected customer experiences had already cost their organization revenue. Eighty percent said content delays had raised costs, led to missed opportunities, or weakened their competitive position. Yet 89% still plan to expand into new markets within the next five years.

A recent panel with Helena Yin Koeppl from AWS, Janet Romero from The Culture Factor Group, Freddie Braun from Monzo, and Jason Hemingway from Phrase put those findings into a broader business context. The discussion raised a question that leadership teams should be asking much earlier in the expansion process. When does the customer in the next market begin to influence the decisions being made today?

The customer is often considered too late in the process

Companies usually know a great deal about their customers when a new product or campaign is first conceived. Teams have a clear view of demand and the commercial opportunity. The difficulty comes later, once those initial decisions start moving through the business.

Janet Romero, who has spent more than 15 years advising global brands on cross-cultural marketing, describes what often happens when content reaches international teams.

“Suddenly localization comes on board, and it’s all about us. The brand is the main thing that needs to travel.”

– Janet Romero, Consultant, The Culture Factor Group

By that point, most of the important decisions are already locked in. The product has been shaped around the original market, leaving international teams to work within choices they had little influence over. They inherit those decisions and have to make them work for customers who were rarely present when they were made.

This helps explain one of the widest gaps in our research. Ninety-five percent of leaders said personalization is critical to winning new markets, while only 28% were confident they could deliver it consistently.

When we asked the live panel audience the same broad question, the response confirmed what the research found. Sixty percent said their content operations were never built for global scale. The remaining respondents said they lacks visibility into what was working, suggesting that many companies are trying to expand without the systems or insight they need.

Personalization becomes much harder when the work begins after the main decisions have been made. A company can adapt language, imagery, and messaging, yet still carry the thinking of the original market underneath it all.

Internal success can hide customer friction

A weak customer experience does not always create an obvious failure inside the business. A market may launch on schedule and meet every internal target, while customers are left with an experience that still feels as though it was designed somewhere else.

Freddie Braun, who leads international content at Monzo as the company expands across Europe, captures the problem well.

“You can have a translation that’s technically perfect and still have an experience that feels foreign to the user.”

In financial services, that feeling can affect something much more valuable than linguistic quality.

“That is the worst possible time for a customer to think, I don’t know what any of this means. Because once that happens, it’s not really a localization problem, it’s a trust problem.”

Most companies are far better at measuring what they produced than how it was received. The small moments of hesitation that shape how people respond to the brand are much harder to see, especially when the internal measures suggest everything is working as planned.

Freddie’s description of good personalization gets closer to the standard companies should be aiming for.

“The goal should never be telling a customer how much we know about them. It’s to remove all those little moments that remind them that the experience wasn’t initially designed with them in mind.”

– Freddie Braun, International Content Lead, Monzo

Trust can shape how quickly a brand establishes itself

How customers decide whether a company deserves their trust varies from one market to another. Signals that establish credibility in one culture may carry far less weight elsewhere.

Janet draws on research from The Culture Factor Group to illustrate that difference. In cultures where social validation plays a larger role, endorsement and the views of other people can carry more weight. Elsewhere, customers may place greater emphasis on evidence or independent judgment.

A successful campaign can travel into another market with the brand intact and still produce a very different response because the cues that established credibility in the original market no longer carry the same weight.

Janet argues that the result is often indifference.

“If a piece of content doesn’t resonate with me, there’s no reaction. Which is worse than a negative reaction for a brand.”

– Janet Romero, Consultant, The Culture Factor Group

Jason Hemingway, CMO at Phrase, made the link to growth.

“Trust is built over time. If you lose it, your time to build it is exponentially harder. What you sacrifice is time, and ultimately revenue.”

Jason Hemingway, CMO, Phrase

For a company entering a market where it has little recognition, those early interactions carry more weight. Customers are deciding whether the brand understands them while the business is still trying to establish demand.

AI is changing when customers first encounter your brand

Companies once had more control over when customers first encountered their brand in a new market. AI-powered search and agents are eroding that control.

Helena Yin Koeppl, who has led AI and data transformation inside P&G, J&J, Bayer, and Thomson Reuters, and now advises AWS enterprise customers, pointed to the way AI-powered search and agents are changing product discovery. Customers can encounter a brand through an AI interface before the company considers itself fully present in their market.

Customers may already be forming an opinion of the brand while the company is still planning its formal entry. Products can appear in recommendations and existing content can be interpreted for someone in another country while the company is still planning its formal entry. Customers may already be forming an opinion before the business believes the market conversation has started. Helena’s warning is simple.

“Brands need to think about it and need to be ready for it, quickly.”

– Helena Yin Koeppl, Executive in Residence, AWS

The global content disconnect report found that 96% of enterprise leaders have made AI central to their content strategy, while more than 70% said they still struggle to engage customers effectively across markets.

When we put this question directly to the panel audience, the answer was decisive. The majority (75%) said the biggest problem was that AI lacked the context to make content feel relevant. Governance (25%) was the second most cited gap.

Helena’s advice is to begin with the customer problem and work backward.

“If you start with the challenge of the customer and consumer, and think from their perspective what could be the difficult part, and work backwards on where to leverage AI to solve that, you are much more efficient.”

– Helena Yin Koeppl, Executive in Residence, AWS

Freddie reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle.

“If the assumptions going into that system are incorrect, then we’re simply scaling the wrong thing faster.”

– Freddie Braun, International Content Lead, Monzo

AI is more valuable when it understands your customer

Most companies can now access AI capable of producing fluent content in many languages. As those capabilities become widely available, access to the model itself will offer less differentiation.

The differentiator is the knowledge available to the model. An AI system needs access to the knowledge a business has built about its brand and its customers. It needs to understand how the company communicates and how expectations change from one market to another. Much of that knowledge already exists inside large organizations, although it is often scattered across teams and systems.

Connecting that knowledge to the people and technology creating content gives the business a much stronger foundation for growth. At Phrase, we call this language intelligence.

The value comes from giving AI the context to make better decisions as content moves across markets. That context develops over time as a company learns more about its customers and how its brand needs to operate across markets. Competitors can buy access to the same AI models. They cannot buy that accumulated understanding of your customers.

For leadership teams, this changes the question around international growth. A product can be available and the launch plan complete while the customer experience is still not ready for the market.  It also depends on whether the customer experience is ready to meet people on their terms.

Five questions for the next market-entry conversation

Only 9% of enterprises in our research say they can enter a new market quickly. For leaders, the more revealing question is whether the customer experience has been shaped for that market early enough to influence the plan itself. By the time launch is close, many of the decisions that define that experience are already fixed.

1. Infrastructure. How easily can the content operation support another market without adding delay or complexity? Strong infrastructure lets teams expand without rebuilding the process for every new market.
2. Speed. How long does it take for customers in a new market to receive the full experience? Speed depends on how quickly the business can bring the complete customer experience into market, not just the first piece of content.
3. Personalization. Does the experience feel designed for customers in that market? Strong personalization reflects how customers in that market make decisions, not just how the brand communicates elsewhere.
4. Language intelligence. Does your AI understand your brand and your customers? AI performs better when it can draw on customer knowledge, brand standards, and market context rather than relying on a generic model alone.
5. Governance. Are quality standards built into the process from the start? Quality is easier to maintain across markets when standards are applied as content is created, rather than relying on manual checks later.

These questions reach far beyond content production. They go to the heart of whether a company is ready for the customers it wants to win.