Why sensible decisions in Marketing, Sales, Supply and Finance can add up to an experience nobody would ever sign off on!
Executive Summary
Customer experience gaps usually form between departments, where Marketing, Sales, Supply and Finance each make sensible decisions that add up to an experience nobody intended.
Drawing on research from Ipsos, PwC, Salesforce and Deloitte, and on the troubled 2024 Sonos app launch, this article shows why fixing problems where they surface rarely works, why mid-level managers spot the gaps first, and how tracing one recurring complaint back to the decision behind it can reveal what really needs to change.
Prefer to listen?
When good decisions add up to a poor experience
One idea from my SOCAP talk in Chicago last week stayed with me longer than the rest. I suspect it’s because I’ve watched it play out in many companies over the years. Every department in a business can honestly believe it serves the customer. It has a scorecard to prove it, while the customer has a rather different story to tell. That story is usually about customer experience gaps: the spaces between departments where nobody is quite in charge.
Poor performance rarely explains it, and neither does that tired word, silos. Most of the individual decisions are perfectly rational. Marketing protects the brand and Sales keeps the retailer happy. Finance defends margin, while Supply cuts complexity. Customer Service operates within the policies and tools handed to it. Each function can hit every target it was set. The combination, though, can produce customer experience gaps that no one designed and no one owns.
The numbers suggest this is far from a niche problem. Ipsos surveyed 735 CX and EX professionals across 45 markets for its Global Voices of Experience 2026 study, and only 57% said their organisation consistently delivers experiences aligned with its brand promise.
PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey polled 406 executives and 5,511 US consumers. It found that 70% of those executives believe customer expectations are moving faster than their company can adapt. Meanwhile, 52% of the consumers had stopped using or buying from a brand after a bad experience with its products or services.
When more than four in ten organisations can’t say they deliver their own promise, and half of all consumers have already walked away from a brand, customer experience gaps deserve far more attention
The customer never sees your org. chart
Companies manage performance vertically, and for good reasons. You need accountability, deep expertise, and someone who owns the number. I’ve never believed the answer to every customer problem is to dissolve the functions and throw everyone into one giant cross-functional team; that usually just creates a new set of gaps somewhere else.
Customers, however, experience the business horizontally. Someone picking up one of your products has no idea that Marketing made one call, Supply another, and Revenue Management a third, nor should they care. They see a single brand name on the pack and assume, quite reasonably, that the company behind it has joined the dots.
Take a brand built around easy family meals. Marketing has done solid work on the consumer and sharpened the promise around reliability and convenience. Supply has, at the same time, cut back an over-complicated portfolio and improved line efficiency. Then Sales lands a strong promotion with a major retailer, again for entirely sound commercial reasons. The promotion works, demand jumps, and the family-size pack (the format that matters most to the target) is suddenly hard to find, because it was one of the formats trimmed in the complexity review.
There’s no villain in that story. Every team did its job, and the promotion numbers probably look excellent in the monthly review. The shopper facing an empty shelf won’t be handing out prizes for functional excellence, though. What she experiences is one of the most common customer experience gaps in CPG: the space between three good decisions.
This matters because companies tend to fix customer experience gaps where they surface, which is rarely where they start. Customer Service gets a new script, Sales has a word with the retailer, Marketing tweaks the messaging, and someone commissions research into falling satisfaction. All of that may help a little; none of it touches the decision that caused the problem in the first place.
Customers already feel how fragmented you are
Salesforce has been tracking this for years. In the fifth edition of its State of the Connected Customer report, 85% of customers said they expect consistent interactions across departments, yet 60% said it generally feels as though they’re dealing with separate departments rather than one company. I find that figure, and the customer experience gaps behind it, far more revealing. Customers are perfectly happy for you to have specialist teams, as long as the structure stays your problem and never becomes theirs.
You can hear it whenever a consumer is told “that’s handled by another department”, as if that were somehow reassuring. You see it when the e-commerce team can’t explain an in-store promotion, when Consumer Services has no visibility of an order, or when a shopper has to repeat details that already sit somewhere in your systems. From the inside, the explanation is obvious: different system, different budget, different team.
From the outside, it’s one company letting them down.
That’s why I think we spend too long debating who owns the customer, and far too little time asking who owns the consequences. When one function’s sensible decision makes another part of the experience worse, whose problem is it? Ask that at your next leadership meeting and watch the temperature in the room change.
Sonos and the cost of a reasonable decision
Sonos is a useful case precisely because its strategy wasn’t foolish. In May 2024 the company launched a rebuilt app, designed to modernise the platform and make it easier to add features in future. Those were sensible ambitions for a business whose software had become hard to extend.
Customers saw it very differently. The new app was missing basic functions, including sleep timers and access to local music libraries, and many users found their speakers simply vanishing from the app. Sonos cut its fourth-quarter revenue guidance, held back two new products until the app was fixed, and estimated it would spend $20-$30 million on the recovery. By August it had also laid off around 100 people, roughly 6% of its staff.
Sonos certainly knew software needs testing. What it underestimated was how much its loyal users valued parts of the old experience, the small everyday features that never appear in a strategy deck. It optimised for a future benefit and paid for it with present-day trust.
CPG has its own versions of this. A packaging change can make complete operational sense and still make the product harder to open, pour or store. A range rationalisation can cut cost while removing the one variant a small but valuable group of shoppers is devoted to. A new price architecture can lift revenue per unit while quietly eroding the value equation that has kept people loyal for a decade.
The company sees a decision; the customer lives with its consequences.
Your brand promise is delivered by people who rarely discuss it
That Ipsos figure of 57% deserves more attention than it’ll probably get. Brand teams pour enormous energy into the promise: positioning, claims, distinctive assets, tone of voice. Very little of that promise is delivered by Marketing alone.
A brand that promises simplicity can be undone by a returns policy written mainly to prevent fraud. A premium brand can be cheapened by a stripped-back service model. This leaves reaching a human nearly impossible. A brand built on generosity can damage itself with a pack downsize that Finance sees as perfectly logical. And a reliability promise can sit alongside repeated out-of-stocks, because forecasting and retailer execution belong to someone else.
In each case, the advertising can be completely on strategy while the business is not. It’s one reason I get uneasy when customer centricity is presented mainly as a culture programme. Culture matters enormously, of course, but good intentions won’t reconcile competing KPIs on their own. Sometimes you have to look hard at what you’re actually paying people to optimise.
Simplifying the organisation makes this more urgent
Deloitte’s 2026 Global Consumer Products Industry Outlook, based on a survey of 300 senior executives, found that 74% of companies are simplifying their organisational structures to reduce inter-dependencies and speed up decisions. Much of that makes sense. CPG businesses have accumulated extraordinary layers of complexity, and there’s no virtue in protecting every committee.
I’d add one caution. Centralising work doesn’t automatically connect the customer experience. A centre of excellence can build deeper capability while moving expertise further from the market. Outsourcing can improve economics while separating the people who hear customer frustration from those who cause it. A flatter structure speeds up decisions, including the bad ones. The real test is whether customer understanding and accountability travel across the new structure as smoothly as the work itself; otherwise you’ve simply moved complexity out of the org chart and into the customer’s day.
Mid-level managers see CX gaps first
This is where mid-level managers matter far more than most customer-centricity programmes acknowledge. They sit close enough to execution to see two sensible decisions heading for a collision. The brand manager knows the retailer promotion will strain an already fragile supply plan. The insights manager can see that a consumer need was translated rather loosely into the final proposition. The CX manager knows the new policy will increase calls, even though the business case assumes the opposite.
The trouble is that good managers become very skilled at covering these contradictions. They make a quick call, persuade another function to bend the rules, calm the retailer, and resolve the complaint before it reaches anyone senior. Everyone then concludes the process works. Organisations quietly come to depend on experienced people patching customer experience gaps that should never have existed, until one of them leaves, the workaround breaks, or the volume grows too large to handle by hand. That’s when an “isolated incident” becomes a business problem.
So here’s a slightly uncomfortable suggestion for any manager reading this. Sometimes the most customer-centric thing you can do is to stop quietly fixing the gap and make it visible instead.
Follow the problem backwards
When a customer issue surfaces, resist the urge to ask straight away which team should fix it. Go further back. Which decisions created the conditions for this? What was each function trying to optimise at the time? Did anyone look at the combined effect on the customer before signing off?
The answers can be awkward. Customer Service may be absorbing a problem created in Product Development. Sales may be discounting to offset a value issue that began in pricing. Marketing may be trying to message its way around an availability problem it has no power to fix.
Finding those connections is far more useful than handing the latest symptom to whichever department happens to be standing nearest.
Where QC2™ comes in
This is exactly why QC2™ doesn’t treat customer centricity as one function’s job. It looks at four areas together: the company, the customer or consumer, the brand, and the processes that turn intention into delivery. Any one of them can look healthy in isolation, with a clear strategy, strong consumer understanding, sharp positioning and efficient processes.
Yet if the strategy rewards behaviour that undermines the brand promise, or a process strips out something consumers value, the problem sits in the connection between them. That’s where customer experience gaps form, and where customer-centric growth most often stalls.
So take one recurring customer complaint in your business this week and trace it back, past the team currently dealing with it. You may find that the people fixing it didn’t cause it, and the people who caused it have never seen what it looks like from the customer’s side. That’s a conversation worth having before another department perfects its own corner of the business.
The QC2™ Business Assessment is designed to surface exactly these customer experience gaps, showing how well your company’s priorities, customer understanding, brand, and processes work together.
Take the free QC2™ Business Assessment: https://c3centricity.com/qc2-customer-centricity-evaluator/
