Industrial Services

Realigning Sales and Delivery Around the Customer Journey

A B2B industrial services company experiencing recurring customer friction at the sales-to-delivery handoff.

We followed live orders from sale to delivery and fixed the three processes where customers were getting conflicting answers.

4→2

Touchpoints a customer needs for a definitive answer

~25%

Faster change-request turnaround

Situation

Customer journey mapping follows one transaction through every department it touches. It is the usual remedy when friction repeats at the same point, because departmental metrics cannot see what happens between departments. A sales team and a delivery team can both hit target while the customer between them hears two versions of the same order.

That was the position here. Delivery had started adding schedule buffers to protect itself, which made quotes less competitive. Account managers were keeping their own trackers outside the order system. Both were signs that the process had not kept up with growth.

What we did

We mapped the journey from first inquiry to delivery and support, and shadowed live orders in both teams for two weeks. The mapping pointed to three processes that caused the customer-facing friction.

Process	What the customer experienced	What we changed
Order confirmation	Commitments made before delivery had checked capacity	Delivery sees sales commitments at the point of sale
Change requests	Slow answers while departments reconciled their records	One shared view of the order, so the request is assessed once
Delivery scheduling	Padded dates and conflicting updates	Schedules set against visible commitments instead of defensive buffers

We chose a targeted redesign over a reorganization. The departments themselves were not the source of the problem.

Impact

A customer now reaches a definitive answer after two contacts. Before the redesign it took four.
Turnaround on change requests improved by roughly 25 percent once delivery could see what sales had promised at the moment it was promised.
On-time delivery improved without adding staff, because the rework created by miscommunication between departments fell away.

What made it work

Visibility at the point of sale

Most of the gain came from one change in timing. Delivery used to learn about a commitment after the order was booked. Now it sees the commitment as it is made.

Watching real orders also mattered. Interviews alone would have given us each department's account of the process, and those accounts did not agree.

Results

Customers get a definitive answer in two touchpoints instead of four

Change requests turned around approximately 25 percent faster

On-time delivery improved with zero additional headcount

Engagement facts

Sector: Industrial Services
Practice area: Transformation & Organization
Client profile: B2B industrial services company
Services: Customer journey mapping, process redesign
Key phases: Two-week diagnostic on live orders; three processes redesigned

This case study is a composite drawn from multiple engagements. Client details have been changed and combined to protect confidentiality, and figures are representative rather than attributable to any single client.