You Are Not Your Customer: Closing the CX Gap

Alumni Impact

20 Aug 2026

Years ago I came across a piece of research by Bain & Company that has shaped how I've looked at business ever since. Bain surveyed 362 firms and found that 80% believed that they were delivering a superior experience to their customers. When they asked those customers, only 8% of them agreed!

Sit with that for a moment. In my experience as a business advisor, almost every owner reading this is statistically more likely to be in the deluded majority than the 8%, and the reason isn't laziness or incompetence. It's perspective.

The one thing I repeat most often to business owners isn't about strategy, funding or organizational design. It's simpler than that: you are not your customer, and you most likely will never be.

You understandably see your business from the inside. Why the pricing works the way it does, which supplier let you down in March, why the lead time is five days and not two, and what it costs to keep the lights on. All that context is behind every decision you make, and because the customer’s reality is invisible to you, you inadvertently design their experience with an inside-out view.

Your customer’s viewpoint

Your customer is somewhere else entirely. They don't see the effort, the trade-offs, or the explanations that fill your day, and neither should they. They see a result, and they measure it against what they believed you promised. Where those two things don't meet, friction appears, and friction is expensive. It presents eventually as slower payment, more complaints, price pressure at renewal, and quiet disloyalty.

By the time it reaches your numbers - revenue, margin, and efficiency, the damage was done months earlier at a touchpoint you never inspected. When you close the gap between who you want to be and who your customers say you are, growth follows. We don’t grow our businesses; loyal customers do that.

Automation versus customer experience

For example: I like reducing admin. I have a client who has an automated invoice reminder that goes out on day 7. From my client’s side it was clean, consistent, and unemotional, in other words exactly what a well-run account receivables process should look like. From their client's side, they’d been with them for four years, they'd never paid late, and now a machine is chasing them for money. Nothing in the message is wrong, but the experience of it is.

These decisions aren’t foolish; they’re usually made for good reasons. That said the reasons live in your head, not theirs.

This is why I put so much weight on customer journey mapping with the businesses I work with. It’s not a workshop exercise that produces a poster, but a discipline of walking through your own business in your customer's shoes, touchpoint by touchpoint, and asking one question at each stop: what does this feel like to someone who doesn't know what I know?

I did this with a specialist services firm that was losing clients at renewal and couldn't work out why. The technical work was excellent and deadlines were always met. When we finally called departing clients, the stinging feedback had nothing to do with the work. Clients would send something through and hear nothing for three weeks, then receive a perfect deliverable.

Internally, that silence was the team’s laser focus. From the customer’s perspective, it felt like being ignored. The fix cost almost nothing: a short update at the progress milestones. Retention improved despite everyone’s scepticism; and that gave them perspective. Their team simply made their excellent work more visible along the way.

Customers buy outcomes, not activities

The same blind spot shows up in how businesses describe themselves, and it's the clearest distinction I know between commoditised and premium businesses. Commodity businesses describe what they do:

We sell fitness memberships and personal training.
We manufacture and sell mattresses.
We provide home-security systems.
We sell healthy, ready-made meals.
We offer educational toys and learning kits for children.

Every one of those is accurate, but also interchangeable with the next 5 competitors, which leaves price as the only remaining question!

The best entrepreneurs I work with describe what changes for the client instead:

Feel stronger, healthier, and more confident in your everyday life.
Wake up rested, pain-free, and ready for the day.
Enjoy peace of mind knowing your home and family are protected.
Eat well consistently, even when life is busy.
Help children build confidence, curiosity, and skills through play.

Same activities but a completely different conversation. One invites 3 quotes, the other invites a conversation about the client's situation.

A simple exercise to flip the script. Finish this sentence without marketing language:

We do X, so that you can ...

Whatever comes after "so that" is the actual outcome your client needs. People seldom buy your activity (ensure you’re compliant, conduct a strategic workshop, etc). They buy the confidence, clarity, freedom, growth, or security that your activities or products create. If you can't complete that sentence without rambling on, your customers can't either!

Deliver outcomes worth keeping

What customers really want is unglamorous and remarkably consistent. They want the product or service delivered in full, on time and in spec, by people who are fast, friendly, and flexible. That's it. No customer has ever renewed a contract because of your internal efficiency ratio.

In our soft economy, where trading conditions are tight and buyers are actively hunting for reasons to cut spend, this matters more now than ever. When budgets get squeezed, customers cut the suppliers who are perceived as a cost. They only keep the ones who are perceived as delivering an outcome the client can't afford to lose.

Being in the 8% doesn't require a rebrand or a new strategy. It requires the discipline to step outside your own building and look back at it the way a stranger would

By: Warrick Strydom – Business Advisor, MBA

Share this article:

Milpark