Here's a question that sounds like a contradiction until you've watched it happen: can a genuinely excellent product make your customer experience worse?

I think it can. And I think a lot of fast-growing businesses are discovering it the hard way, right about now.

Good digital products aren't hard to find any more. The competition between product teams to ship innovative, customer-centric features has been so fierce that the baseline of what people expect has risen enormously. And every so often something takes off properly - a combination of sharp product decisions and a business model aimed squarely at the complacency of whoever came before.

The challenger banks are the obvious example. Monzo built a product where moving money is effortless - splitting a bill, dropping cash into a savings pot, opening a joint account in the time it takes to make tea. Tide went after small business owners with simplified expenses. Starling offered a free business account. In each case, the product team was the engine of the whole company, and it worked spectacularly. Millions of users, billion-pound valuations, revenue curves that make investors go misty-eyed.

So why are the cracks showing?

The great product paradox

Because each of those businesses has seen complaints climb. Mishandled data. Poor customer relations. In some cases, people struggling to access their own money. And this is where the paradox lives.

Customer expectations don't stay in their lane. If your product sets an extraordinary standard - instant, elegant, frictionless - then that becomes the standard your customer expects from every other part of you. Your complaints process. Your onboarding. The email they get when something goes wrong at 11pm.

And most of the time, those parts of the business haven't been anywhere near the investment the product got. So the gap between the app and the apology is enormous, and the customer feels it as a betrayal rather than an inconvenience. You taught them to expect brilliance. Now you're asking them to accept a 48-hour SLA and a template.

Your product sets the standard your customer will hold every other part of you to. Including the bits you haven't invested in.

The crossover point

There's a moment in a product's life I find genuinely interesting, and I think it's where a lot of these businesses currently are. It's the point where your user base stops being early adopters and starts being everyone else.

Early adopters turn up despite the risk. They're forgiving. They rather enjoy being early to something - the bugs are part of the story they tell at dinner. But the rest of your customers arrive precisely because they've decided there's no longer much risk involved. They're not here for the adventure. They're here because their salary lands in it.

Those people behave differently. They complain about bugs the early adopters would have shrugged at. They complain about the exciting new feature, because it moved the button they'd learned to find. And that changes what the product team can do - the appetite for bold iteration quietly shrinks, because every change now annoys someone who just wants their bank to be boring.

So the business hedges. The second wave of hiring moves away from product and into support, service, the customer-facing functions that aren't product. Which is sensible. But it runs straight into the second problem.

You can't bolt a good experience onto a great product

Expanding the support team to absorb rising complaints won't work if the experience of being supported doesn't match the experience of the product. If it takes ten seconds to send money and ten days to get an answer about where it went, the customer doesn't file those separately. They file them under "you".

This is the reframe I'd offer, and I'd go further than most: a bad complaints process isn't a customer service failure. It's a product failure that happens to occur outside the app. It's the same brand, the same promise, the same customer. You just stopped designing at the edge of the screen.

What to actually do

I'm not for a second suggesting product teams slow down - great customer experience is impossible without a great product, and the funding model for most growth businesses rewards product potential above all. Building a world-class complaints function around a mediocre product would be an odd way to spend your money.

But I would ask you to look at the whole journey with the same seriousness you apply to the interface. Map the end-to-end experience, not just the bit that ships. Find the moments where a customer leaves your beautiful product and meets your ordinary operations, and be honest about the drop in quality at that seam. That seam is where advocacy goes to die.

So the question. If you scored your product experience out of ten and then scored what happens when a client has a problem, how far apart are those two numbers? And who in your business owns the gap?

If nobody does, that's worth a conversation. Book a short discovery call with the team at Distinction - no pitch, just an honest look at where your experience breaks.