Why exceptional customer experience means designing for disappointment

From California’s wildfire-induced Public Safety Power Shutoff to hurricane-driven blackouts in the Southeast to polar vortex events in Texas, power outages are no longer rare. They are expected. And with that, customer disappointment is no longer an exception — it’s a core CX.

When the power goes out, customers don’t just lose a service — they lose agency, comfort and sometimes safety. These moments are emotionally charged, and they demand a different level of care. Utilities are increasingly expected to deliver not just power, but clarity, empathy and visibility.

Frameworks that focus on effective communication during these critical moments can help utilities and other service organizations communicate clearly about the cause and status, provide timely restoration estimates, offer practical advice and emotional assurance, and close the loop after recovery with proactive follow-up.

In a world of increasing climate disruption, grid instability and rising expectations, utilities must view outage planning as a brand-defining opportunity. Utilities now have access to real-time platforms that enable proactive hyperlocal communication, integrating grid data with customer behavior and channel preferences. But these capabilities are not operational. They are experiential. The organization needs to have clean accessible data about the health and status of the grid, as well as a communications plan and a thoughtful tone of voice. This pairing of operations and experience marks the next frontier of disappointment design. When customers don’t receive timely, accurate information during an outage, that’s not just dissatisfaction — that’s strategic damage.

Additionally, recognizing the different types of disappointment — predictable vs. unexpected —enables brands to tailor their communication strategies. Predictable disruptions may require clear expectation setting and personalized support, while unpredictable challenges necessitate an empathetic and adaptable approach. Successful companies leverage data to identify the type of disappointment and craft responses that resonate with customers’ emotional and informational needs.

Not all disappointments are equal: There are disappointments we can control and plan for, and those we can’t. To design effectively, brands must first understand that disappointment comes in different forms.

Knowing which kind of disappointment you are dealing with is half the battle. The rest is building the muscles to respond intentionally. When it comes to designing for utility outage experiences, outage types require tailored approaches. The worst dissatisfaction scores often come from partial outages with unclear causes — not because the outage is longer, but because customers are not provided with an explanation of why their power is out, why their neighbors’ power isn’t out, what’s being done to address it and when they can expect it to be restored. Customers left in the dark (literally and figuratively) have a worse experience than those kept informed and updated.

Some companies have turned disappointment into a differentiator. They’ve figured out how to take what should be a loyalty killer and use it to deepen an emotional connection and, ultimately, shareholder value. Better customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores correlate to revenue growth, enhanced brand reputation, stock performance and a reduced impact of negative CX when they occur.

 The winners are ones that:

• See disappointment as a designable experience
• Invest in tooling, training and principles to manage disappointments proactively
• Use data, empathy and creativity to make a bad moment a positive memory

And then there are the losers — companies that:

• Treat disappointment like an anomaly
• Rely on scripts, generic support channels or worse — blame shifting
• Try to optimize away disappointment rather than strategically engage with it

The winners don’t just do better with the user experience (UX). They do strategic, emotionally intelligent disappointment design.

From work across industries, a clear set of design principles emerges for what can be called “disappointment experience.” These principles are explained below.

Proactive expectation setting 

Disappointment thrives in the delta between what was promised and what was delivered. The sooner and more clearly that gap is addressed, the less disruptive the emotional fallout. Shrink that delta early.

While utilities have improved their outage communication strategies, there is still work to be done. In a study by Escalent — Cogent Syndicated Utility Trusted Brand & Customer Experience: Residential Q1 ’25 — 22% of respondents who experienced an outage within the previous six months that lasted longer than five minutes reported that their utility had proactively contacted them about the outage. This correlated with higher scores for customer-reported impact safety and reliability.

Personalized recovery paths 

Not every customer experiences disappointment the same way. Some want acknowledgment. Some want an apology. Others want a refund. The ability to tailor responses to what makes a customer feel heard is increasingly critical. Design for all of them.

Customers provided with a post-outage resolution contact have 6% higher brand trust and service satisfaction scores and a 7% higher safety and reliability score.

Emotional UX

This is about more than interface or copywriting — it’s about tone, language, timing and the emotional intelligence of the moment. The way something is said often matters more than what is said. Does it sound like someone cares?

Speed to empathy

In high-stakes moments, customers don’t just want information — they want reassurance. A timely, human-centered touch point can shift an experience from frustrating to forgivable. The faster a customer feels seen and understood, the more likely they are to forgive — and even advocate.

As the restoration process proceeds, sharing updates and reassurance with customers when information becomes available (e.g., field crews responding, estimated restoration time (ERT) updates) has a positive impact on the safety and reliability score. In the first quarter of 2025, more than 50% of respondents who experienced an outage in the prior six months that lasted longer than five minutes reported that an ERT was shared; 36% recalled receiving an updated ERT.

Design for the worst day, not the best

Too many journeys are designed for the ideal scenario. The best ones start from the assumption that something will go wrong — and build in the resilience, responsiveness and grace to navigate it well. Start with the fail state, then build up from there.

Across various planned, unplanned or partial outages, the lowest safety and reliability scores are for outages that are unplanned and have no clear cause. Scores can be improved for all types of outages if they are built into the design.

Agentic AI may be an incredible catalyst in this arena — first, by reducing the human errors that often trigger avoidable disappointments, and second, by dynamically personalizing the disappointment experience.

This is where technological evolution presents a unique opportunity for businesses to transform their approach to customer disappointment. Agentic AI, for instance, has the potential to transform how disappointment is sensed, personalized and resolved at scale. When powered by integrated grid and customer data, these tools allow organizations to tailor messages by neighborhood, outage type and customer profile.

Here’s where it gets interesting: 

• Prevention: Artificial intelligence (AI) can prevent some disappointments before they happen (think: predictive issue detection, real-time rerouting). 
• Personalization: AI can adjust the disappointment response — like providing proactive updates, faster service escalations or refund offers — based on individual customer preferences, tone, history and even mood. 
• Variability: Not every customer needs the same script. AI allows brands to scale custom emotional responses. 
• Memory: Agentic systems can remember past disappointments and resolve them holistically, not as isolated issues. 

The future isn’t just about notifying customers. It’s about understanding who they are, what they value and how they prefer to receive bad news. 

Disappointment isn’t going anywhere. But your response to it? That’s where loyalty is won or lost. When disappointment is treated as a designable moment, not just a metric, customers respond with trust.

Disappointment is no longer a CX failure. It’s a strategic frontier.

It tells you where expectations are misaligned. It reveals what customers truly care about. It offers a moment to demonstrate empathy, responsiveness and leadership. 

In the P&U space, where stakes are high and trust is fragile, those who design for disappointment will win the next era of customer loyalty.