Your customer doesn't care which department owns the problem

Businesses have departments. Customers don’t.

This sounds incredibly obvious, and yet so many customer experiences make me think we’ve forgotten it.

Inside a business there is marketing, sales, product, operations, customer service, retail, ecommerce, brand, innovation and probably seventeen Slack channels I don’t understand.

Outside the business there is just... the business.

I don’t know that the slightly baffling checkout journey belongs to ecommerce while the promise that got me there belongs to marketing and the thing that arrived damaged belongs to operations.

They’re all you.

And every one of those experiences is teaching me something about you.

This is one reason I struggle when brand gets treated as something owned entirely by marketing. Of course marketing has a huge role in shaping what people expect, but if the rest of the experience repeatedly contradicts that expectation, the customer is going to believe the experience.

You can tell me you are easy. If dealing with you is difficult, you are difficult.

You can tell me you care. If customer service makes me fight for three weeks to get a refund, that is the meaning I make.

You can tell me you are premium. If the product arrives looking like it has been kicked down the road, I have some additional evidence to consider.

The interesting thing is the cumulative mental map.

Every interaction is adding or removing something.

Which means understanding the customer often requires moving across the artificial boundaries the organisation has created internally.

People experience the whole thing.

Businesses probably need to look at it that way too.