Ask a business owner how a customer is looked after and you will usually get a confident, detailed answer. Ask their customers the same question and the answer is often different. The distance between those two answers is the Experience Gap, and it is where customers are quietly lost.
Every business has two customer experiences
The first is the intended experience. It might be written into a procedure manual, or it might live entirely in the owner’s head, but it exists. It is the version, for example, where the phone is answered within three rings, the enquiry is followed up the same day, the customer is greeted properly and a complaint is handled before the customer even thinks to write a review.
The second is the actual experience. That is the one a customer gets on a Tuesday afternoon when your usual person is off sick, the enquiry form is broken and has been for a week, and you have a casual employee or a brand new team member that has never been shown how to handle a refund.
The Experience Gap is the distance between those two experiences. Almost every business has and experience gap yet very few have ever measured it.
Why the gap opens
There are a number of reasons as to why the gap exists:
- Growth outpaced the process – what worked with three staff does not hold at twelve.
- Knowledge left with a person – the way things were done was never written down, it was just known.
- Systems were added one at a time and nobody has walked the whole journey end to end since.
- Something was set up correctly once, and everyone assumed it was still running correctly.
- Nobody inside the business has ever been through it as a customer.
It’s hard to see from the inside
This is the part that catches most businesses and business owners out. You know where your entrance is, you know which options to press on the phone menu to get to the right location, you know the person answering on Fridays is new, you even know that a delay issuing quotes is only temporary.
In most cases, your customer knows none of that. Customers engaging with your business, especially for the first time, experience your business in a different way to you. Their age, their mobility, how confident they are with technology, whether English is their first language, whether they are in a hurry with two kids in the car. Every one of those changes what the experience feels like from their side of the counter.
An experience that works perfectly for you is not the same as an experience that works.
Signs you have a gap
- Repeat business is slipping and nobody can point to a single cause.
- You hardly ever get complaints or negative feedback: The majority of customers do not complain, they simply don’t return.
- Reviews mention things you would never accept as a business owner if you had seen them happen.
- Your team has quietly built workarounds for a process nobody has fixed.
- Enquiries come in but do not convert, and nobody has tested what actually happens to one.
- Two staff members answer the same customer question two different ways.
How to close it
Closing the Experience Gap is not complicated, but it does have to be done in order.
1) Map the intended experience. Write down what is supposed to happen at every stage, from the first time someone hears about you through to what happens weeks after the sale. Most businesses find gaps at this stage alone, before anything has been tested.
2) Test the actual experience. Have someone go through it as a customer would. Call the number. Fill in the form. Walk in cold. That is what CX Testing does, and it is the only way to see what a customer sees.
3) Compare the two and fix in priority order. Not everything matters equally. A broken enquiry form costs more than a dated brochure. Sequence the work by what is actually costing you customers.
Where to start
If you have never measured this, start small.
The free CX Score takes about five minutes and gives you a read on where the gaps are most likely sitting. It is ten questions, seven on customer experience and three on what happens when something goes wrong.
Most people who complete it say the same thing: it was not the score that was useful, it was the questions we ask. Somewhere around question four you find yourself thinking, we do not actually do that.
That thought is the gap, now you can do something about it.
Take the free CX Score here. Five minutes, ten questions, an honest read on where you stand.