The experience gap in customer success: What it is and how to fix it

You know that quarterly business review (QBR) where you proudly showed your leadership team all those green metrics? The one where CSAT scores were trending up, support tickets were resolved within SLA, and your onboarding completion rates looked fantastic?

Your customers might still think you're failing them.

I've spent 30 years in this business – 25 in financial services before making the jump to tech – and this disconnect between what we measure and what customers actually experience keeps me up at night. 

When I joined GitHub, I was tasked with building out their customer experience team. At that point in my career, I thought I'd genuinely seen it all. 

But the shift from financial services to technology taught me something crucial about this gap. In finance, everything had to be perfect, tested, regulated. In tech? We ship to learn. We iterate. We move fast.

Yet somehow, in both worlds, we keep making the same fundamental mistake: we measure what we do, not how customers feel about what we do.

The 72% disconnect that should terrify you

Bain did a study that should make every CS leader lose sleep. They found that 80% of CEOs believe their company delivers an exceptional customer experience. Only 8% of their customers agree.

Sit with that for a moment. That's a 72-point gap between perception and reality. There are two critical errors that I see companies make every single day. 

First, you developed all those metrics without asking me how your clients actually felt about the experience. You treat them like a data point, not a human being with emotions and expectations.

Second – and this one's less obvious – when you and your team defined that exceptional experience, you did it based on your own knowledge and assumptions. Pretty biased, definitely siloed, and not at all representative of what your customers actually want or need.

These two mistakes create and widen the experience gap. And if you think this doesn't apply to your tech company or your CS team, I've got news for you.

Why the experience gap matters more than ever

80% of customers report that experience is a key factor in their buying decisions. We're not competing on features and price anymore. We're competing on how we make customers feel.

Here's what keeps me focused: 61% of customers will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. Sure, in customer success, when you're deeply embedded in their tech stack, maybe they won't switch immediately. But resentment builds. Frustration accumulates. And when that renewal conversation comes around, all those little paper cuts add up.

The flip side? Customer-centric companies are simply more profitable. Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than their competitors. Think about your own life for a second. If your neighbor told you they're paying $10 less per month for their internet service, would you switch? Of course you would! You have zero loyalty to your internet provider.

But what about the brands you do stick with, even when cheaper alternatives exist? That's the power of experience. That's what we need to create.

Welcome to the experience economy (where feelings drive revenue)

Back in 1998, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore wrote a Harvard Business Review article that changed how I think about customer relationships. They introduced the concept of the "experience economy" – where consumers don't just pay for goods or services anymore. They pay for experiences that impact their lives.

Think about the evolution of the humble birthday cake. Years ago, mothers made cakes from scratch using eggs, flour, and sugar from their pantry. Then came the "goods economy" – Betty Crocker cake mix made baking easier. The "service economy" brought bakeries where you could just pick up a finished cake.

But in the "experience economy"? Parents outsource the entire birthday party to Chuck E. Cheese. The cake becomes free because it's not about the cake anymore. It's about the experience.

Now you might be thinking, "I work in tech. This doesn't apply to me."

Does your company have swag? That's experience. Do you host big customer events? Experience, again. What does your website feel like to navigate? How do customers feel when they interact with your product? Are you just another vendor they'd switch from to save money, or do they feel genuinely connected to what you're building together?

The rising tide of customer expectations

The experience economy has fundamentally changed what customers expect from us. They expect personalization at every touchpoint. They want to feel connected to your company and what you stand for. They want to participate; to have visibility into your product roadmap, input on features; they want to be heard.

And here's the kicker: awareness and expectations are accelerating. I remember saving box tops from cereal, mailing them in and waiting six to eight weeks for some cheap toy to arrive. Today? If something's not at my door in two days, I'm frustrated. Your customers work with other platforms, other technologies. Whatever the industry leader delivers becomes their baseline expectation for you.

These expectations are changing faster than ever. Which means if you already have an experience gap, the experience economy is making it wider every single day.

Journey mapping is your first tool for bridging the gap

One of the most powerful tools for closing the experience gap is customer journey mapping. I've led about a hundred journey mapping sessions throughout my career, and they're consistently frustrating for one reason: everyone wants to talk about what they do instead of what customers experience.

People say things like, "Well, we need to send them the onboarding email" or "I need to hand this off to implementation." Stop. Remember, this isn't about you. Your customers don't buy your product thinking, "You know what? I can't wait to be onboarded and retained!" They want to save money, increase efficiency, solve problems. The journey map needs to reflect their perspective, not yours.

A journey map isn't a process flow, though teams constantly try to turn it into one. It's a representation of your customer's experience as they interact with your company. It can cover the entire lifecycle, drill into specific phases, or examine particular transactions. The unique element – and this is where I usually get eye rolls – is that we map how customers feel throughout their journey.

People always resist this. "Feelings? Really?" Yes, really. If onboarding your product is frustrating and time-consuming, that sentiment directly impacts renewal. The poet Maya Angelou said it best:

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

Your customers are doing exactly that with your company.

The steps to effective journey mapping

Start by setting clear goals. Are you mapping the entire customer lifecycle? Focusing on a specific phase like onboarding or renewal? Get specific about scope.

Next, define your personas. The technology manager trying to save money and increase efficiency has different needs than the end user who just needs to get their daily work done. Each persona has different jobs to be done. Is your product actually helping them accomplish those jobs? Their journey with your company varies based on who they are and what they're trying to achieve.

Identify the key touchpoints and jobs to be done. Why did they buy your product in the first place? What are they expecting from each interaction? If you're mapping the full lifecycle, early stages might include product awareness, website experience, sales conversations, and transition to implementation. Keep asking yourself: what is the customer trying to accomplish here?

Pay special attention to pain points and moments of truth. I spend a lot of time in customer experience focusing on pain points – I'm everyone's favorite person, constantly poking at problems. But moments of truth deserve equal attention. These are the experiences you might take for granted that actually create the most value for customers.

Building and validating your journey map

As you analyze the journey for each persona, you'll start developing an ideal state. Which pain points are minor annoyances versus major blockers? What moments of truth are you maximizing? Build out your roadmap for improvement based on what you learn.

Here's the critical part: you must validate this with actual customers. Leverage your CSM teams, sales teams, field engineers, support teams – everyone who interacts with customers daily – to build your hypothesis map. But you can't stop there. You need customer validation.

I use customer advisory boards (CABs) for this. I put on customer events with breakout sessions. I run online panels. The message is simple: "This is what we think your experience looks like. Do you agree?" And remember, in our experience economy, customers want to participate in this process. They want their voices heard.

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Why voice of the customer is your second bridging tool

Beyond journey mapping, you need systematic ways to capture customer sentiment. Now, I hear this all the time from CS teams: "We talk to our CSMs. They say customers love us."

Sure, they do. No customer is going to tell their CSM they're doing a terrible job. That's why voice of the customer programs matter – they create a neutral channel for honest feedback.

While it would be ideal to have all your customers in a room together – and through customer advisory boards, sometimes we do – the reality is that surveys remain one of the most practical ways to gather feedback at scale.

The question isn't whether to survey, but when and how. Different types of feedback matter at different points in the customer journey. Onboarding is crucial – how was that experience? What worked? What didn't? Are you where you expected to be when you purchased the product?

You also need relational or loyalty surveys that look beyond individual transactions. I might have several good interactions with your support team – they solve my problems efficiently, they're friendly and helpful. But I'm still angry that I had problems in the first place. Transaction surveys miss this bigger picture entirely.

That's why you need annual or bi-annual relationship surveys alongside targeted transaction feedback for support interactions, renewals, and key milestones.

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The metrics that actually matter

We love our metrics in customer success, and there are several voice of the customer metrics worth tracking. NPS gets debated endlessly – people love it, hate it, question its validity. My take? It's good. It works. But the real gold is in the customer comments.

Sure, we can use AI to analyze themes and patterns. I do that. I put summaries in front of leadership all the time. But I also tell them: pour yourself a coffee or wine, whatever your preference, and read through these 500 comments. Someone took time from their busy day to tell you what you could do better. That's gold.

CSAT works well for specific interactions – support tickets, CSM touchpoints, feature satisfaction. But the metric gaining the most traction in customer experience is customer effort score (CES). In our experience economy, customers expect interactions to be easy.

No one’s denying that you have a great product. And yes, your CSM might be fantastic. But if billing is a nightmare, if getting through to customer support requires jumping through a million different hoops, if simple tasks require multiple touchpoints – you're making your customers work too hard. 

And when customers have to work hard to work with you, they're spending more time and money on something that's supposed to save them both.

A real-world effort score nightmare

Let me share a personal example that crystallizes why effort score matters. I had minor surgery scheduled two months out. They told me I needed a 10-minute phone screening. Fine. 10 minutes of questions, done.

Then the texts started. Constant reminders to upload my driver's license, my insurance card and to fill out forms online. This was two months before the procedure, and the texts wouldn't stop. (Around the holidays, no less.)

Then I received a package in the mail – it looked like a six-year-old had stuffed an envelope. It contained all the same forms I'd already completed online. I called them, frustrated. "No, we have everything," they assured me. Two days before surgery? Another text asking for the same information.

Terrible customer effort score. Why was scheduling surgery harder in 2025 than it would have been in 1950? That's what your customers are asking when you make them jump through hoops.

Bringing it all together

If you're facing an experience gap – and the data suggests most of us are – you need a systematic approach to bridge it. Build your customer journey with your customers' actual needs in mind. Validate everything with real customers. Don't assume you know what they want. Measure how they feel, not just what you do.

Your customers aren't data points. They make decisions based on how they feel. When we design for that, when we measure that – that's when we start delivering the exceptional experiences we think we're already providing.

This article has been adapted from James' talk at Customer Success Summit Austin 2025, titled "Bridging the experience gap in the experience economy."

You can watch James' full talk OnDemand with a CSC membership plan.