You know your business. But do you know what it's like to be your customer?
You understand how your business works, but your customers only know what it's like to deal with you and those aren't always the same thing.
Imagine walking into a shop where the staff know exactly where everything is, but nothing is clearly signposted, or visiting a website where the business owner can find every service in seconds, but a first-time visitor doesn't know where to begin. Maybe you make an enquiry and receive a perfectly friendly response that doesn't actually answer your question.
None of these experiences necessarily indicates a bad business, but they do highlight something important.
The experience you intend to deliver isn't always the experience your customers receive.
Customer experience is bigger than customer service
One of the most important distinctions in business is the difference between customer service and customer experience.
Customer service is what happens when someone needs help, customer experience is everything that happens before, during and after they deal with your business.
It's how they discover you, how they understand what you offer, how easy it is to make a purchase or enquiry, how clearly you communicate, how confidently they can make decisions and how they feel once the transaction is complete.
You can have a wonderful team providing exceptional service and still have a customer journey that's unnecessarily difficult.
That's why looking at individual interactions isn't enough, you need to look at the whole experience.
The commercial importance of getting it right
This isn't simply about making customers happier, customer experience can influence whether people buy from you, return to you or recommend you.
PwC's 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that 29% of surveyed consumers had stopped using or buying from a brand because of poor customer experience, online or in person.
The survey isn't specific to UK independent businesses, but it reinforces a broader point: experience influences commercial decisions and sometimes, the reasons people leave are surprisingly ordinary.
Confusing information.
An awkward process.
Unclear expectations.
Poor communication.
Small moments that collectively make dealing with a business harder than it needs to be.
Why I always come back to the customer journey
My background includes digital strategy, user experience, conversion optimisation and performance measurement.
Across those disciplines, there's a common principle: understand what people are trying to achieve before deciding how to improve the experience.
When reviewing a website, for example, I wouldn't want to judge it purely on appearance, I'd want to understand how people arrive, what information they need, where they go next and whether the experience supports the action we want them to take.
Analytics can help identify patterns, user research can help explain behaviour and a structured review can reveal issues that aren't immediately obvious, but the principle applies just as much to a physical shop, hospitality business or professional service.
A customer journey isn't limited to digital channels.
It's the entire experience of dealing with you.
Where businesses can lose customers without realising
Some customer experience problems are obvious, complaints arrive, reviews become negative and customers tell you something isn't working.
Others are much harder to see. Someone visits your website but doesn't enquire, someone starts a booking but doesn't finish, someone makes a purchase but never returns or someone recommends a competitor because their process is more convenient.
These moments often happen without direct feedback and that's why it's dangerous to assume that a lack of complaints means everything is working perfectly.
What the research tells us about friction
Baymard Institute's analysis of 50 eCommerce studies puts average online cart abandonment at approximately 70%.
That doesn't mean 70% of customers have been driven away by poor design, many are simply browsing or aren't ready to purchase, but Baymard's research also identifies avoidable reasons for abandonment, including unexpected costs, forced account creation and complicated checkout processes. The lesson for independent businesses extends beyond eCommerce.
Making customers work unnecessarily hard creates barriers between interest and action.
Those barriers might appear in a booking system, enquiry form, service explanation or customer handover, the opportunity is to identify which barriers matter and remove them.
Try experiencing your own business
Here's a practical exercise.
Set aside an hour and approach your business as though you've never encountered it before.
Start with discovery
Search for your business and your main services. Can you find what you're looking for? Is it obvious who the business is for? Does the information answer the questions a new customer might have?
Follow the buying journey
Try to make an enquiry, book an appointment or purchase a product.
Use your mobile phone.
Notice every moment where you hesitate, have to think or need additional information.
Look at what happens next
What confirmation do you receive? Are the next steps explained? Is communication timely and consistent? Does the experience reflect the quality and personality of the business?
Ask someone else to do the same
This is particularly valuable. Ask someone unfamiliar with your business to complete a realistic task, don't guide them, observe where they struggle and what questions they ask.
You may discover that something you've always considered straightforward isn't straightforward at all.
Don't fix everything. Fix what matters.
A customer journey review can uncover dozens of possible improvements, that doesn't mean you need to act on all of them. Prioritise based on customer impact, commercial relevance and the effort required. A confusing booking process might deserve immediate attention, a minor visual inconsistency might not, the objective isn't to create a flawless experience at any cost, it's to make the experience clearer, easier and more effective where it matters.
The best customer experience improvements often start with better questions
What are customers trying to achieve? What's getting in their way? Where are we making assumptions? What evidence do we have? What could we change to make their experience better?
These are the questions that can turn customer experience from a vague ambition into a practical business discipline.
You know your business. But sometimes it takes a different perspective to understand what it's really like to be your customer.
See your business through a different lens
The Clare Edit helps businesses review their customer experience, identify opportunities and prioritise practical improvements.
Research references
PwC (2025), Customer Experience Survey.
Baymard Institute, Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics.
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