UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging, Revised and Updated

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Experience Gap

ONE OF THE things companies need to realize is that they are only as good as the weakest experience of their customer. Many businesses are guilty of creating a great experience to get a first sale from you, but are really bad at keeping that level of service going. Once these customers get to the post-first-sale place, their experiences change. Your service is only as good as the worst experience a customer will have, not the best. It works with that age-old phrase: You are only as strong as your weakest link.

The space between the best services, often what a new customer receives and the worst experience, is what I call the Experience Gap. As a business owner your goal needs to be having no gap at all, optimizing every point of contact with your customer. As the gap grows, so will your customer’s dissatisfaction.

I recently experienced this myself on two different occasions. The first was a negative experience with a store where I had shopped for a long time—Best Buy. The second was an outstanding experience with Cirque de Soleil in Las Vegas.

I was shopping for a voice-to-text software program that allows me to dictate into the computer and have it translated into text—one of the important tools that I am using to write this book. My amazing Twitter followers recommended a particular brand and I found the title at Best Buy, one of my favorite electronic superstores. The title was on sale and therefore sold out there, so I decided to take the trip across the ...