Customer Experience often lives within Marketing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the two are always aligned. There is even more room for disparity when CX lives in departments other than Marketing. Today we’re talking about your advertising and marketing versus your customer experience, and the importance of making sure that the experience being advertised to your customers is consistent with what your customers actually experience when interacting with your brand.

When advertising doesn’t align with experience

A lot of money and resources are spent on marketing and advertising — creating wonderful visions within customers’ minds about what an experience with any given brand is going to feel like and look like.

We’ve all been to hotels, restaurants and other businesses that provide incredible pictures and a feeling on their website, but then when we get there it doesn’t quite feel the way it did online.

This leaves us feeling like “Wow – our expectations from this brand’s advertising is very different than what the actual experience is.”

That’s an extremely dangerous place to be

When the expectation set by marketing is incongruent with the actual experience, it will not only deter people from returning to your business, but it will also drive those people to potentially go online and share it with the world.

When we say that customer experience is all about consistency across every channel, that includes marketing and advertising. Don’t let your marketing team or advertising agency position you in a way that you can’t realistically deliver. Customers will not be happy, they won’t come back, and you won’t get the ROI from your Voice of Customer program.