Does Your Customer Strategy Survive a Tuesday Morning in November?

I have seen hundreds of customer journey maps in my career. They are almost always beautiful. They are color-coded, logical, and perfectly designed. On paper, the customer moves seamlessly from point A to point B. The systems work. The staff know exactly what to say. The sun is always shining.

I live in the reality of a wet Tuesday morning in November. The day when staff sickness is high, the primary system has just gone down, and volumes have spiked because of a billing error sent out the night before.

For over thirty years, I worked on the operational side of that reality. I’ve stood in contact centers and distribution depots when the beautiful strategy sent down from the boardroom simply collapsed under the weight of real life.

I’ve seen frontline teams blamed for "poor service" when, in reality, they were heroically holding together a broken process with sticky tape and goodwill. I’ve seen leaders make decisions based on Green-Status dashboards, completely unaware that the human experience underneath those numbers was crumbling.

If we want to build trust, we have to close the gap between what we intend to happen and what actually happens when the pressure is on. We need to stop designing for slides and start designing for the people who have to deliver the promise when the systems fail.