The 72-Point Lie
In 2005, Bain surveyed 362 companies. 80% of executives said their company delivered a superior customer experience. 8% of their actual customers agreed. The gap is 72 points. It is the most quoted statistic in customer experience consulting. It is also the most ignored.
I keep coming back to it. Twenty years later, the gap has not closed. Not closed, not narrowed in any meaningful way, not even contested. The global insights industry is at $153B a year. There are more research vendors, more dashboards, more brand trackers, more NPS programs, more persona documents, and now a full new layer of synthetic respondent platforms launching every quarter. Companies are spending more, measuring more, and reporting more. And the 72-point gap is still there.
I have spent enough time around customer insight functions to know why. The gap is not a measurement problem. The instruments are honest. The teams are diligent. The vendors are competent. The gap is structural. The instruments cannot see it because the instruments are inside the company that is trying to close it.
I want to walk through the mechanism. It is uncomfortable. I am writing it anyway.
The persona document is fan fiction
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