What we think we do vs. what the world thinks

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A tough challenge some marketers face is when the customer thinks we are one thing, and we think we are something different.

At the DCX conference, I showed what attendees thought customer experience, or CX, was about:

Above, I summarized 226,000 tweets about CX and clustered them by their most common words. The top word people associate CX with is customer service.

After the first day of the DCX conference, I used IBM Watson to summarize the hundreds of tweets of CX professionals and what they said CX was about by proxy from their session tweets:

Above, we note a much greater diversity of language people used to describe CX.

Consider these two usages of words to describe the same concept. What’s the problem?

The problem is that when what we think we do overlaps very little with what the world thinks we do, we will struggle to prove our value and command a premium for our products and services. The world – our audiences, our customers – is what pays for us to do what we do.

Our brand is the purple intersection above. The larger we can make it, by aligning our customers and our own perceptions, the better we’ll do.

If your business faces a similar conundrum, educating the world about what you do becomes a top priority in order to command greater than commodity pricing.

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