Ciera Peters | The Liquidity Journal | Q3 2026

You know your business from the inside. Your customer only knows it from the outside.

You know why the website is structured the way it is. You know what the acronyms mean. You understand why a customer has to complete three forms before moving to the next step. You know which department handles what, why the process developed that way, and what happens behind the scenes to make everything work.

Your customer knows none of that. They know what they see. They know whether they can find what they need. Whether the instructions make sense. Whether someone answers when they have a question. Whether the process feels effortless or unnecessarily complicated. Whether they feel understood, valued, ignored, or inconvenienced.

And from that perspective, your intentions do not matter nearly as much as you might think.

The Inside-Out Problem

Businesses naturally see themselves from the inside out.

We organize around departments, responsibilities, systems, products, policies, and processes. Over time, those things become so familiar that they begin to feel obvious.

They aren't.

A process that makes perfect sense to the person who built it can be completely confusing to the person encountering it for the first time.

A sales page can be technically accurate while leaving a prospective customer unsure what they are actually buying.

A beautifully designed website can still make someone work too hard to find a phone number.

An onboarding process can contain everything a customer needs while still feeling overwhelming.

Not saying the business is doing something wrong. Just that the business has become accustomed to seeing the experience from its own vantage point. Familiarity is useful for running a company, but not always for understanding one.

Expertise Has a Blind Spot

The more you know about something, the harder it can become to remember what it was like not to know it. This is particularly true in businesses built around expertise.

An attorney understands the terminology. A financial professional understands the products. An insurance professional understands the distinctions between policies. A software company understands its platform.

The customer may understand none of it. Yet businesses often communicate as though the customer has been sitting in the room for the last five years. This is where jargon becomes more than a writing problem. It becomes a perspective problem.

When we say, “It’s obvious,” what we often mean is, “It’s obvious to me.”

Those are not the same thing. The challenge is not to make customers less ignorant of our business. It is to become better at communicating from where they actually are.

Experience Is the Product

Customers don't experience your organizational chart. They experience your business as a series of moments:

They see the advertisement.

They visit the website.

They make the phone call, fill out the form, or make the purchase.

They wait for delivery.

They ask for help.

Each moment contributes to an impression of the whole. This is why a business can have an excellent product and still deliver a mediocre experience. The product is only one part of what the customer encounters.

Consider a restaurant with exceptional food but an impossible reservation process. Or a luxury hotel with beautiful rooms but an indifferent front desk. Or a software platform with powerful features that a new user cannot figure out how to access.

From inside the business, these may look like separate issues, but from the customer's perspective, they are all the same thing: This is what doing business with you feels like.

Borrow Their Perspective

One of the simplest ways to identify these problems is to temporarily stop being the owner, executive, marketer, or expert.

Become the customer. Visit your website as though you have never seen it before and try to purchase something without relying on what you already know.

Call your own phone number.

Read your confirmation emails.

Fill out your own forms.

Go through your onboarding process.

Ask yourself questions you would normally assume the customer already knows how to answer.

Where did you hesitate?

What made you wonder what to do next?

What required you to make an assumption?

What did you have to search for?

What felt unnecessarily difficult?

What made you think, “Why do I have to do this?”

Those moments are valuable because they expose the difference between how a business operates and how a customer experiences it. Sometimes the most useful exercise is to have someone completely unfamiliar with the business do the same thing. Don't explain anything to them.

Watch.

The moment they stop and ask, “What does this mean?” is information. When they say, “I don't know where I'm supposed to click,” is information.

If they hesitate before submitting a form because they're unsure what will happen next is information.

Don't correct them. Listen to them.

The Customer Doesn't See Your Effort

There is another uncomfortable truth about perspective:

Customers can't see everything you did right.

They don't see the hours spent fixing the problem before it reached them or how many meetings went into designing the process.

They don't know that the employee who didn't call back was dealing with three other emergencies.

They don't know how difficult it was to build the website.

They don't know that the complicated form exists because your compliance department requires it.

They only experience the result.

That doesn't mean those internal realities don't matter. They matter enormously to the people running the company. But they are not necessarily relevant to the person on the other side of the transaction.

A customer doesn't award points for effort they never experience. That's why perspective requires separating what we know happened behind the scenes from what the customer could reasonably perceive.

Look for Friction, Not Just Complaints

Customer feedback is useful, but waiting for complaints is a poor way to understand the customer experience.

People don't always complain. Sometimes they simply leave.

They abandon the form or don't return the call.

They decide the process is too complicated and choose a competitor.

They tell someone else, “I don't know. It just wasn't for me.”

The absence of a complaint doesn't necessarily mean the experience was good.

The best businesses learn to look for it before customers have to point it out.

A confusing step. An unnecessary approval. A form asking for information that has already been provided. An email that leaves the recipient wondering what happens next. A sales conversation that answers questions the customer wasn't asking while failing to answer the one they were.

None of these may qualify as a crisis.

Collectively, they can shape the entire relationship.

Perspective Is a Business Skill

Seeing through your customer's eyes is often treated as a marketing exercise.

It is bigger than that. Perspective affects product design, operations, sales, communication, technology, customer service, and strategy. It helps you identify where your systems are serving the organization rather than the person they were built to serve. It can reveal opportunities that are invisible from inside the business and perhaps most importantly, it forces humility.

You may discover that something you considered intuitive isn't.

You may find that a process you thought was efficient is exhausting.

You may learn that the thing you are most proud of isn't what customers value most.

That can be uncomfortable, but also incredibly useful, because businesses don't exist from the perspective of their owners. They exist in the experience of the people they serve.

Of course your business makes sense to you. You've spent years building and learning how it works. The more important question is this: What does it feel like to encounter your business for the very first time?

That is the perspective worth seeing.

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