There is a gap in every business I have worked in, and it is the most reliable place to find money. It sits between what the organisation believes the customer experience is and what the customer actually experiences.
Nobody is lying. The belief is assembled from a journey map drawn two years ago, a dashboard measuring the happy path, and the experience of colleagues who all have accounts, employee context and the ability to ask someone internally when something goes wrong.
Why internal teams cannot see it
Proximity. After six months inside a business, you cannot use its product like a stranger. You know which button is misleading, so you no longer misread it. You know the delivery message is wrong, so you discount it. The friction becomes invisible precisely to the people with the power to remove it.
The friction becomes invisible to exactly the people with the power to remove it.
How I go looking
- Buy something. Properly, with my own money, on a phone, on a normal connection, without telling anyone.
- Then break it. Change the order, fail a payment, ask for a refund, contact support and time the reply.
- Read the last two hundred support tickets. Not the categories, the actual text.
- Read the reviews between three and four stars. Five stars tell you nothing and one star is often not about you.
- Sit with the support team for a morning and listen to what they explain repeatedly.
The support inbox is the most under used research asset in most companies. It contains a prioritised list of your problems, written by customers, at no cost, and it is usually read only for volume and response time.
What the gap looks like when you find it
Rarely a broken page. Usually a promise made in one place and quietly not kept in another. A delivery window on the product page that fulfilment cannot meet in practice. A cancellation described as easy in the marketing and routed through a form in reality. A subscription that says pause anywhere and offers it in one place only.
Those are not UX problems and they cannot be fixed by the team that owns the page. They are organisational gaps that show up as customer experience, which is why they persist through several redesigns.
The habit worth building
Once a month, someone senior buys something and writes down what happened. Not a report, half a page. It is the cheapest research a company can run and the first thing to disappear when things get busy.