Good morning. Nobody in your business decided to disappoint that customer. It happened anyway.
Marketing.
The Delivery Gap
Think of the last customer who left unhappy — not angry enough to complain, just gone — and ask yourself where the distance actually opened: in what they'd been led to expect, in what you'd told your team to deliver, or in the delivery itself. Most businesses answer that by having a word with whoever served them. That is the one place the gap usually isn't.
In 1985 three marketing academics published a paper in the Journal of Marketing that reframed service quality as a distance rather than a standard. A. Parasuraman and Leonard Berry, both marketing professors at Texas A&M, working with Valarie Zeithaml, had interviewed executives across four service businesses and run focus groups with their customers, and what struck them was how consistently the two sides described different things. So they drew the difference as five gaps. Gap one sits between what the customer expects and what management believes they expect. Gap two, between what management understands and what actually gets written into a standard. Gap three, between the standard and what's delivered. Gap four, between the delivery and what marketing promised. Gap five is the customer's own — the distance between what they expected and what they felt they received — and it's produced entirely by the other four. The trap is treating every service failure as gap three, because gap three is the only one you can watch happening. It's staffed by people with names, and it's the cheapest one to blame.
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