Stop Talking About Customer Experience (And Start Doing It)

Your customer experience is probably a lie.

Not intentionally, of course. But it’s a lie of omission. It’s the gap between the exciting things you say in your marketing and the generic, forgettable reality of doing business with you.

Every bank, for instance, insists it’s “a different kind of bank.” Yet they all feel the same. If you swapped the logos, you’d never know where you were. They spend millions on ads about being unique, but they’ve put all their real effort into simply “looking like a bank.”

This isn’t just about banks. Think about the IT firm that sells a “strategic partnership.” Their website is full of words like “proactive” and “integrated.” But when you become a client, every interaction is a faceless support ticket with a 24-hour response time. The experience doesn’t feel like a partnership. It feels like a call center.

This happens because marketing writes checks that operations can’t cash. The marketing team builds a beautiful story. The operations team builds an efficient process. One is measured on brand perception, the other on profit margins. The customer gets caught in the middle, experiencing the disconnect.

Most companies treat customer experience as a layer of paint you apply after the real work is done. It’s a finishing touch. An afterthought.

That’s a strategic failure.

Your customer experience isn’t a department or a checklist. It’s the physical proof of your company’s reason for being. It’s where your core values stop being words on a poster and become tangible. It’s where your customers decide if you’re actually different or just another commodity with better ads. Your positioning lives or dies in these small moments.

You can’t just talk about it. You have to build it into every corner of your company. For a service business, the experience is the product. It’s the only thing a client truly buys.

Forget your new ad campaign for a minute. Go be a customer of your own company and find the honest answers to these questions.

• What does it feel like to call your main phone number?

• What happens when you submit a support request?

• How does your team sound when they answer the phone?

• What message does your last invoice send?

Those small, real interactions tell a customer what you truly value. That’s your real customer experience. And if it doesn’t align with your marketing, one of them is a lie.