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May surely has been a change of season and not just weather wise! Europe got a fresh batch of MEPs, Australia went to the polls and the UK lost May. It has also been a change of weather in my head. Here are some lessons from last month which I summarise as three types of gaps I see around me.

The Experience Gap:

“80% of CEOs think they are providing a superior experience. 8% of their customers think so.”

That is one big gap! Ryan Smith from Qualtrics opened X4 Summit in Sydney on this note. Inspired by the speakers at the conference I’d like to build on this data point. For the gap to be so big there are two other realities to take note of:

Primarily, I think that the teams that are led by those same CEOs think far less about experience than they should. It does not feature enough in their KPIs, and, often, when it does feature it is not followed up rigorously.

Secondly, I guess that if you had to ask the same CEOs what is the experience of working for their company, they would rate it much higher than their employees.

As cliché as it might seem, experience management is not optional. If you opt not to make it a priority, your customer will not make you a priority either and leave when others make them their priority. Same goes for the employee. In Smith’s words, if you are not racing up in the experience economy, you are racing down…and winning has become even harder.

The Design Gap:

So how do you start by closing the experience gap? I found the answer on a pair of socks which I took back with me from Blackdot’s Customer-Centric Growth Summit. I must admit I was surprised to dig out the socks from the conference goodie bag, but then it all made sense! Spotted with Blackdot’s dot the socks have printed on them the words “Take a walk in your customers’ shoes”. 

The great Don Norman wrote an interesting piece on how design is failing to take into account its user, in his example the elderly. His argument is pretty logical and explains the design gap brands fall into:

“Everyday household goods require knives and pliers to open. Containers with screw tops require more strength than my wife or I can muster…Companies insist on printing critical instructions in tiny fonts with very low contrast.”

The same train of thought may be used for other consumer groups, not just the elderly. This is surely a design gap to be aware of.

The Human Gap:

I cannot look back on May, and not take lessons from May herself, Theresa May that is. I am really not into the UK political scene but I did watch the UK Prime Minister’s resignation speech. It is no surprise that the media focused on the last few moments of her speech when her voice cracked. So many have commented in so many different ways on these last few moments of the speech. Personally, I felt that it was such a human and authentic moment, so genuine, so rare for any leader, both in the political and the business world.

In the same month another female Prime Minister taught the rest of the clan one thing or two about being human. On Jacinda Ardern’s initiative together with French President Emmanuel Macron, leaders met with big online players in Paris for a summit against online extremism. Back in New Zealand, she then went on to present the first ever Wellbeing Budget, which is a policy innovation not just for the country she leads, but for the rest of the world.

Ardern’s tenure as PM is teaching the world that you can still be brave and not forget to be human. Patricia Limanouw from Qantas ended her insightful piece at X4 with a fitting quote from Brene Brown.

“Courage is contagious. Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver.”

The three gaps build on each other, and so does the hard task of addressing them. To close the experience gap one needs to really take a walk in the customers’ shoes and be sensitive to the user. However sensitivity calls for us to not only to be accurate but also to be human, put a human face to the insight, whatever that is, wherever that is required. Above all, it calls for us to choose courage.