Narrowing the EPG ... your experience perception gap.

Customer experience is how your customer’s ‘perceive’ their interaction with your business ... ?your people, products and services. And because it’s your customer’s perception, it is therefore their reality; a reality that often differs dramatically from the organisation’s own perspective.

Bain and Company, one of the world’s leading management consultancy firms, demonstrated this a few years ago when a survey of 362 business clients revealed the following:

96% of businesses stated they were customer focussed.

80% claimed that they were delivering a superior customer experience.

Yet, only 8% of customers of those very same companies surveyed reported they were the recipients of a superior customer experience … that’s a whopping 90% difference in perception.

It’s called the EPG ... the Experience Perception Gap. Sadly, in most cases, an enormous divide between what businesses believe they are delivering versus what their customers report receiving.

“The way someone else perceives what you do is a result of their own experiences (which you can’t control), their own preferences (which you can’t predict), and their own expectations (which you don’t set).”

– James Clear? Atomic Habits

It is important to remember that quality and value are always and only ever perceptions in the mind of your customer; rendering what you and/or other businesses think of quality and value as barely relevant.

The reason we are suffering from a marketplace epidemic of mediocrity is that a great many businesses have lost touch with the needs, wants, demands and expectations of their customers.

Want Proof? … think of all the businesses that you do business with on a regular basis and try and recall the last time one of them actually took time out to ask you how they could improve and better service your business requirements. Not a quick-fire two-question online survey, but a genuine human-to-human communication from your supplier or service provider. For many people, this has NEVER happened.

Customer experience has three levels of execution. I call them the three abilities ... the first is capability, is the functional capacity to provide the best readily available product or service that your customer is seeking. The second is accessibility, the seamless, easy to access, easy to communicate, easy to pay for, easy to take delivery of, product or service. The motto of level two is ‘make it easy as easy as possible for your customers to do business with you.’

The third level is enjoyability, where doing business with you is a pleasant and enjoyable experience, so much so that your customers can’t wait to tell friends and family how enjoyable their experience of doing business with you was.

Without signing off on all three levels of the customer experience, the perception gap will remain a gaping chasm, a gap that will maintain a high level of vulnerability to new entrants and new technologies.

Narrowing the perception gap by taking dedicated time out to engage with your customers to truly understand exactly what they want is step one in designing and delivering a great customer experience … your number one competitive advantage in today’s demanding and disruptive marketplace.