Your CX Knowledge Gap might be Killing your Business

By Marvin Heffernan and Cathy Fennell

Senior leaders often believe they know what customers want, either through hearsay or through various satisfaction surveys and other ‘listening’ methods.

However, customers often hold unvoiced expectations and perceive a vastly different experience from the one the company thinks is true.

This misalignment leads to a dangerous trap: knowledge gaps and misguided actions that are far from trivial.

As McKinsey highlights in their article Bias Busters: When the question – not the answer – is the mistake, one global retailer acted on their current data suggesting they had a pricing and promotion problem. They created promotions to boost average order value, only to discover months later that the real issue was declining trust in product quality and delivery reliability. Their initial framing of the problem led to actions that produced short-term gains but increased the erosion of customer loyalty and profitability. The lesson? “A good answer to the wrong question can be just as devastating as a bad one.”

Forrester’s research reinforces this point. In their report on Customer Obsession, they found that only 3% of companies are truly customer obsessed; meaning they consistently seek to understand, anticipate, and exceed customer expectations.

The financial implications of unmet expectations are clear. PwC research shows that one in three customers will walk away from a brand they love after a single bad experience whilst, conversely, Forrester reports that those companies embracing customer obsession achieve 2x higher revenue growth, profitability, and retention.

The “look but fail to see” syndrome

Despite the proliferation of data and listening tools, many organizations still don’t gain the impact they hope for from their various CX initiatives.

If there is one thing to keep in at the front of your mind, it is this simple universal truth:

Loyalty is driven by ​your customers’ perceptions of ​YOUR performance ​vs ​THEIR expectations​. Whether it is your product, service, pricing, delivery, staff, operational practices or your facilities, the same principle applies.

Ineffective CX initiatives and customer churn creeps in when this fundamental logic gets misdirected by internal assumptions and partial or skewed data.

The most common mistake is failing to truly understand the customers’ expectations; after which, all routes to delivering a great CX are hit and miss.

The second most common mistake is using simple ‘single score’ measurement mechanisms (used in customer satisfaction or NPS surveys) to assess your performance; Why? – because there is tendency to ‘fix’ the lowest scoring areas, which are often not the areas that need most attention to gain best impact.

How to bridge the knowledge/loyalty gap

Promising Outcomes uses the most direct route to uncover knowledge gaps and unlock that valuable customer engagement. At its core it is shockingly simple:

• UNDERSTAND EXPECTATIONS TO RESET THE PLAYING FIELD: Let the customer tell you what they expect of an IDEAL experience with your sort of company/product (identifying which of those expectations are most important). No assumptions, multiple choices, or leading questions, just let them share what’s top of mind for them.
  
• MEASURE HOW WELL YOU ARE DELIVERING AGAINST THOSE EXPECTATIONS: Find out how well your customers think you are currently performing against the expectations they said were most important (not what you think is most important). Your measurement should identify where you sit in relation to a bandwidth of what the customer thinks is ‘acceptable’ performance, because that range of acceptability is the scale by which they are internally assessing you!
  
• COMPARE COMPETITIVE PERFORMANCE: Where relevant, find out how well those same customers think your competitors perform against those priority expectations.
  
• FOCUS ON THE VITAL FEW: Don’t try and tackle everything at once. Fix the areas where you have the biggest performance ‘gaps’ (not the lowest scores), leverage the areas where you are strongest compared to the competition and, if relevant, throttle back on any areas where you are needlessly ‘overperforming’.

A different perspective = bigger / faster commercial return

In a marketplace characterised by disruption and uncertainty, the cost of misaligned customer insight is measured not just in lost revenue, but in missed strategic opportunity.

By letting your customers define their expectations and rigorously measuring your performance against those priorities, you gain actionable clarity to focus resources where they deliver maximum impact.

Don’t let assumptions or outdated metrics steer your strategy. Partner with Promising Outcomes and their proven approach to uncover hidden perspectives and turn it into decisive action, growth, and competitive edge.

The next move is yours—make it count.