Customer Experience
Trend Track

Insights on Business and Consumer Research

In many cases there was a significant gap between the experience companies thought they were portraying and the experience customers actually received. Our research also found that the experience companies were portraying was not deliberate and being left primarily to the discretion of employees. This short-sighted approach to the market, which we call inside-out (i.e., business centric rather than customer centric), necessitates an urgent response from corporate decision-makers. In short there is a need to become more aligned to customer expectations or risk losing market share to more focused competitors.

Critically we also found that this gap in understanding extended to customers’ emotions: customers feeling significantly more negative and less positive towards companies than businesses believe.

This lack of business Emotional Intelligence is of concern, considering that emotions are the key component in the design of a differentiated Customer Experience.