Designing Operations Around the Customer Experience
Customers do not see departments. They see what happens to their order as it passes between them.
Two sets of targets, one customer
A customer's experience of an order is continuous, while the company's view of it is split by department. Sales is measured on bookings and delivery on schedule and cost, so each can succeed on its own terms while the order between them goes wrong.
The usual responses are to retrain staff or add a coordinator, and neither changes the fact that the two teams are working toward different objectives with different information.
Symptoms worth noticing
- Delivery adds buffers to its dates because it does not trust what sales has promised.
- Quotes become less competitive as those buffers grow.
- Account managers keep their own spreadsheets to track what was really agreed.
- Customers call more than one person to confirm the same detail.
Each of these is a rational defence by someone inside the process, and together they show that the official process has stopped carrying the information people need.
Follow the order
Customer journey mapping traces a single transaction through every department it touches, and it differs from process improvement inside a function because it looks at the joins. In most B2B operations the mapping points to a small number of places.
Exhibit 1: The three processes where sales-to-delivery friction most often appears, and the usual fix.
| Process | What the customer sees | Typical fix |
|---|---|---|
| Order confirmation | A promise that is later revised | Delivery sees the commitment at the point of sale |
| Change requests | A slow answer, or two different answers | One shared record of the order |
| Delivery scheduling | Padded dates and late updates | Dates set against visible commitments |
A targeted fix, not a restructure
Once the friction points are known, the remedy is often modest, because the departments are rarely the problem and the timing of information usually is. When delivery learns of a commitment as it is made, most of the rework disappears.
In one composite engagement, an industrial services company redesigned these three processes after a two-week diagnostic. Customers reached a definitive answer in two touchpoints instead of four, and change requests turned around about 25 percent faster. Read the customer journey case study.
A full reorganization costs more, takes longer and may leave the same information gap in a new structure, so it is worth trying the narrow fix first.
Measure the result from the customer's side by counting the contacts needed to get a firm answer and the time taken to confirm a change. Those two figures show whether the handoff has improved, whatever the departmental scorecards say.
Key takeaways
- Pick five recent orders and trace each from inquiry to delivery, noting every time information changed hands.
- Count how many contacts a customer needs to get a firm answer on a change request.
- Look for private trackers kept outside the order system, and ask why they exist.
- Give delivery access to commitments at the moment sales makes them.
Map one customer journey with us
We can shadow live orders across your sales and delivery teams and show where customers receive conflicting information.
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