A construction company treats a build as routine while the client treats the same build as a once-in-a-lifetime purchase, and that mismatch is where customer experience breaks down.
Construction companies and their clients are not having the same project. For the company a build is routine work, repeated across a portfolio. For the client it runs once, and it is the largest purchase of their life. That difference is where customer experience in construction breaks, and it surfaces as repeated questions long before it surfaces as a complaint.
Improving customer experience in construction starts with removing a mismatch, not with being friendlier. A company and its client are working from two different pictures of the same build, and communication written from the company picture keeps missing.
Sarah Keppens, founder of the customer experience consultancy Customerry, hears that mismatch defended in a single sentence: that is just how construction works.
It is said without defensiveness, which is what makes it hard to argue with. In a recorded conversation with Ziggu co-founder Vincent Van Impe she names what sits underneath it, the think principle: we assume the client understands what we understand.
The assumption is invisible from the inside. A site manager who writes “screed poured, drying time two weeks” has said everything that matters to a site manager. The client reads a word they have never used and a delay they did not expect, and calls to ask whether something has gone wrong.
Nothing had gone wrong. The update was written in the wrong picture.
Three things follow from that, and they are the practical work. Say what the step means for the client, not what it is called on site. Say what happens next and when, because the silence between steps is what generates the call. And put both in a place the client can open again next week, because an answer that lives in one sent email has to be given twice.
None of that is a tone problem. A company can be warm, responsive and well liked and still leave every client guessing, because warmth does not tell someone where their project stands on a Tuesday evening.
Breaking out a wall is a Tuesday for a construction professional and a milestone for the person paying for it. The same event sits on two completely different clocks.
A construction company runs a portfolio. This build is one of fifteen, and the question that matters about it is whether it stays on schedule.
The client runs one project, once. It is their money, their future address, and a decision they cannot undo. What matters to them is whether anything is going wrong right now, and they have no way of knowing.
So the client asks. Not because the company has been careless, but because the only instrument they have for reading the project is a person who answers the phone.
The gap is not in effort or in goodwill. It is in what each side can see.
Clients do not benchmark a construction company against other construction companies. They benchmark it against everything else they buy.
Keppens puts the point in one line: if she can follow the delivery of a scouring sponge, why can she not follow her own building project. It is a fair question, and it is not really about software. It is about the fact that every other industry has taught buyers to expect a status they can check without asking a human being.
For years the sector felt no pressure from that. Demand outran supply, clients were relieved to find anyone available at all, and the quality of communication rarely decided who got the job. In Keppens’s words, companies could get away with a lot, because the work needed doing either way.
Two things ended that at once. Demand no longer outruns supply everywhere, so communication has started to influence who gets hired. And some companies now run structured client communication as standard, which shows the rest of the market what is possible.
Most construction companies communicate a great deal. The problem is where it lands: an email thread here, a WhatsApp group there, a decision agreed verbally on site and never written down anywhere.
Nothing in that list is careless. Each channel was the fastest option in the moment it was chosen. Together they leave the project without a single place where its current state exists.
The bill arrives later. A subcontractor works from a drawing that was superseded two weeks ago. A colleague who joins in month four inherits nothing. A client asks about an approval and three people give three answers.
| What a project produces | Scattered across channels | On the project |
|---|---|---|
| Progress | Told to whoever asked, when someone has time | Published once, checked by the client |
| Documents | Attached to a thread, latest version unclear | One current version, with who opened it |
| Decisions | Agreed on site, remembered differently later | Recorded with a name and a date |
| Questions | Waiting in one person’s mailbox | Visible to the team that can answer |
| The record afterwards | Split across everyone’s inbox | Still there years after handover |
Public complaints follow that structure rather than the building work. In Ziggu’s Google Review Study: Belgian Property Developers 2026, communication and reachability turned up in 44,6% of the 734 negative reviews in the sample, ahead of every other theme, including finishing quality.
The fix is not a better answer. It is an answer that stays put.
Once status, documents and decisions live on the project rather than in a thread, the client stops asking for things that already exist, and the team stops re-answering them. What is left is the work.
How that plays out day to day on a site, with photos, drawings and subcontractors, is set out in client portals for contractors.
