Matthias SpeicherIn short
The customer journey is a production line. Defined steps, a cycle, an ideal. The only difference is that the ideal isn’t standardised, because people differ, and that in most companies no one owns the whole run. Everyone optimises their segment, no one owns the whole. The friction arises exactly where the silos meet. And the customer is left to deal with it.
Picture a production line with no one in overall charge. There’s a lead for the screws, one for the paint, one for assembly. Each optimises their section. No one owns the run. What happens? Faults pile up at the handovers, and in the end the line either stops or turns out a product no one wants.
In a real factory you wouldn’t tolerate that for three days. You see the defect rate immediately, you step in, you shut the line down if you have to. A line just like that has been running in many companies for years, only one level up and out of sight. It’s called the customer journey.
The journey is a production line
This isn’t a metaphor picked to sound neat. It’s a consistent principle. A journey consists of defined work steps, of expectations, of a cycle, of a goal. A car drive is one. Using software is one. A charging session is one.
The difference from the classic production line sits in one spot. In the factory the ideal is standardised. Every part should look the same. In the journey the ideal isn’t standardised, because people differ. The ideal is each customer’s own idea of a successful run. And from that follows a strategic decision many companies shy away from.
You can’t serve everyone. You decide which ideal you build the line for. Build an SUV and you don’t win over sports car buyers, and that’s not a failure, it’s the decision itself. In customer experience the same holds. Trying to please everyone ends where you build a line for an ideal no one holds. Stuck in the middle, as strategy calls it, is death in the journey too.
Behind this sits positioning. As dated as the word sounds to some, here it’s the decisive factor. If you don’t know whose ideal you’re building the line for, you can’t align the journey and you optimise into the void. That’s a large topic in its own right, and I devote a separate article to it. For here it’s enough: without clear positioning there’s no clear journey.
Where the friction actually arises
In most companies each segment of the journey is looked after by a different team, and each team optimises its own goal. Marketing optimises leads. Sales optimises deals. Product optimises features. Service drives ticket numbers down. Everyone does their job, and everyone does it well. Only no one cares about the run the customer actually experiences.
The customer doesn’t experience friction within the segments. They experience it at the handovers, where one team passes to the next. The friction lives in the handoffs between the silos. The handover point belongs to no one, so no one looks after it, so something breaks there.
In the charging market you can show this on the trust formula. Trust comes from reliability, reasonable pricing, accessibility and expectation consistency. Reliability is owned by a technical team in the field. Pricing is set by sales. Accessibility sits with infrastructure and site planning. And expectation consistency, the question of whether the customer experiences the same thing today as last time, is owned with luck by someone, mostly by no one. It grows wild, on a hope-for-the-best basis. Right there, at that ownerless fourth factor, is where trust is lost. Not through an event, but through erosion at the interface.
Why you don’t see it
The reason this line can run for years without anyone shutting it down is visibility. In the factory you see the defect rate immediately. A part fails, the number is on the screen, the line lead reacts. In the customer journey you see no defect rate. You see only churn and bad reviews, and both only once the customer has long since left in their head.
The friction at the handoffs generates no ticket, because technically it doesn’t count as a fault. Every segment reports green. Marketing delivered, sales closed, the product works, service has few tickets. All the metrics look good, and the customer is gone anyway. Because the metrics measure the segments, not the run.
Most companies have the data. The question is what they do with it
The real dividing line doesn’t run between companies that have data and ones that don’t. Most have the data. The difference lies in what they make of it.
When a signal appears, there are three options. You open a ticket with the maker and push it along. You send a field team out and fix the single case. Or you understand what the signal means from the customer’s side and solve the cause before it hits the next customer. The difference between these three decides whether an organisation is built to learn or to react.
Reacting means catching every drop individually. Learning means understanding why it’s leaking and sealing the spot. One doesn’t scale, the other does.
What it takes
The solution is easy to name and hard to implement, because it touches vested interests. It takes ownership of the whole journey. One owner, or a team, that owns the entire run, end to end, across the departments. Not another segment lead, but someone whose metric is the run itself.
But ownership alone isn’t enough. Responsibility without power fizzles out. Whoever owns the journey has to be able to decide and enforce across departments too. That takes two things. Backing from top management, or in doubt the departmental goal always wins. And a new objective that deliberately breaks the department lines open rather than confirming them.
Because it’s a systems problem, and it only solves as a system. The contradictions between the silos don’t vanish by appointing a caretaker. They vanish when the system itself is rebuilt. And here it’s worth looking at the nature of systems. They tend to fall back into their old equilibrium after a disturbance. A half-hearted intervention peters out, and the organisation is back where it was six months later. For a new equilibrium to emerge, one closer to the target state than the old one, the intervention has to be strong enough, in amplitude and in duration. Not a single push, but sustained pressure, until the system settles anew. That’s the real consequence of listen, learn, act, repeat. The repeat isn’t an add-on, it’s the condition for the change to hold.
From a company’s side this metric is called utilisation in charging, because trust translates into return and return into utilisation. In other industries it’s called something else. The mechanism is the same. A value stream with real end-to-end ownership, instead of a row of departments that each shine on their own and together lose the customer.
The real target of the work isn’t the segments, it’s the deviations. The customer has a job they want done, an idea of how the run succeeds. Wherever the journey deviates from that job, friction arises. The task is to address those deviations so the line runs. Not to optimise more segments, but to own the run.
In production you’d shut down a line with no owner after three days. So the question for every company with an ownerless customer journey isn’t whether that’s a problem. It’s why they don’t change it.