CX and Co / The Whole Journey

Nobody owns the middle of the journey

The start and the end attract attention. The long ambiguous middle attracts none.

Attention follows visibility, and the two most visible moments are the beginning and the end. The beginning is where new revenue is counted, so it is designed, tested and rehearsed. The end is where the transaction closes, so it is measured. The middle, which is where most of the time is spent and most of the anxiety lives, is often nobody's project. It is the weeks of waiting, the partially completed setup, the thing that is supposedly in progress with no way to see what progress means.

Customers experience the middle as silence, and silence is read pessimistically. In the absence of information, people assume they have been forgotten, and often they are right. The predictable result is contact: calls and messages asking for a status update. Those contacts get counted as demand, staffed for, and managed down with faster handling, when they were manufactured by the organisation's own failure to say anything.

Fixing the middle rarely requires new capability. It requires deciding what a customer should be told, when, and by whom, then saying it without being asked. Progress information is cheap to send and expensive to withhold. If the honest update is that nothing has changed, that is still worth sending, because the message underneath it is that somebody is still holding the thing you handed over.