Tomayto / Tomahto: Are You and Your Customers Really Talking About the Same Things?

By Marvin Heffernan

Why experience failure is often caused by misaligned priorities

Most language differences are harmless. If a US barista asks whether you want “cream” in your coffee, you might decline out of British modesty—only to later realise “cream” simply means milk. A quick laugh, a small correction, no real damage done.
In customer and employee experience, misalignment works the same way—except the correction often comes too late, and the consequences are far more expensive.
And crucially:

The missed point: You can have the right ingredients in the wrong order

In How Good Is Good Enough? we argued that expectations don’t sit still. The bar of what is acceptable can shift with every interaction.
This article adds the next, and often overlooked, layer:

You can be working from the correct list of expectations and still fall short because you’ve ranked them differently from your customers.

If the last article explained the height of the bar, this one is about where you’re aiming your jump.

Organisations rarely ignore expectations outright. They fail more subtly:

• They invest heavily in things customers assume should happen automatically.
• They under-invest in the moments customers feel most personally and emotionally.

It’s the difference between saying the same words and speaking the same language.

Leaders’ confidence vs customers’ reality

The gap is well-documented.

• 80% of business leaders think they meet customer expectations, but only 24% of customers agree (Amdocs CX20).
  
• 63% of customers would switch providers after just one bad experience (Zendesk CX Trends 2025).
• Trust continues to erode: 64% believe companies are reckless with their data, and 72% want to know whether they’re interacting with AI (Salesforce State of the AI-Connected Customer).

With tolerance low and switching easy, misalignment is not a subject to put off until later, because it has an immediate commercial threat.

Where the “Tomayto / Tomahto” problem really shows up

Imagine you run an internal workshop and produce a list of customer priorities:
quality of deliverable

• price
• security
• speed
• ease
• value
• respect

Nothing wrong with the list. It’s sensible and familiar. Then you gather customer expectations properly—and the picture shifts:

• The things the organisation treat as big-ticket priorities (e.g., quality, price, governance) are things customers might expect as a ‘given’.
• The things leaders might treat as polish (e.g., communication clarity, issue ownership) might be what customers feel most intensely and most often.

Why even “small” misalignment feels big to customers

When priorities are out of order, customers don’t complain about strategy. They complain about lived experience:

• “I have to chase for updates.”
• “Nobody owns my issue.”
• “It feels harder than it needs to be.”
• “I’m just a number.”

These aren’t vague sentiments. They’re leading indicators of churn, complaint escalation, and reputational fragility.
Employees feel it too. Over time, it can feel like a constant state of firefighting which impacts staff morale, disengagement, and attrition.

A recent client of ours faced exactly this misalignment issue. Well-intentioned operations were set up to be service-execution driven. Daily activities consequently prioritised ‘doing my bit really well’, but unintentionally de-prioritised the ‘communications’ work. Meanwhile the customers were frustrated by a lack of single ownership, status updates, proactive thinking, and coordination across different parts of the organisation.

Same ingredients.
Different recipe.
Different result.
This is how well-run organisations unintentionally manufacture friction at scale.

Where our expectations methodology helps: making priority visible
Our expectations methodology is built for this exact problem.
Instead of guessing, we:

1. Capture expectations directly, from customers and employees.
2. Surface the hierarchy they use to judge experiences.
3. Identify the gaps between what organisations optimise for and what customers actually value first.

The output is not another list. It’s a priority map showing what must come first, what supports it, and what currently sits in the wrong position.

This is how organisations move from debating symptoms to aligning around the customer’s lived experience. A classic scenario in an IT company being “we are losing customers, so we need more digital features…” versus “because clarity and support rank higher than capability, we need to help our customers understand what we’ve already built and help them get the best out of it.”
Once alignment happens, business as usual begins to shift—because everyone finally shares the same definition of value.

Final Thought

How Good Is Good Enough? explained that the standards expected by your customers can change.

Today, we are shining a light on the fact that a mismatch in priorities can drive your organisation to habitually frustrate your customers. Misalignments often stay invisible until customers decide you “don’t get them” and quietly move on.

Speaking the same language is not enough. You also need to know that you have the same interpretation and alignment around the same priorities.