Come and sit with this idea for 5 minutes

Your customers shouldn't have to understand your organisation.

There is a particular kind of frustration that most of us have experienced.

You contact an organisation with what feels like a fairly simple problem. You're transferred to another department. They tell you it belongs somewhere else. You explain everything again. Someone gives you another email address. The website sends you to a form. The form generates a reference number. And somewhere along the way, your fairly simple problem becomes your responsibility to navigate.

The organisation may know exactly why this happens.

There are different teams. Different systems. Different budgets. Different responsibilities. One supplier handles this bit. Another department owns that bit. The policy says one thing. The system allows another.

All perfectly understandable from the inside. From the outside, it's just hard work.

The organisation is showing

That's usually the clue.

Customers start seeing the machinery behind the experience.

They're told which department owns something. They're expected to understand different channels. They're passed between teams because responsibility changes halfway through a journey. They're asked for information they've already provided because two systems don't speak to each other.

Individually, every part of the organisation may be doing exactly what it's supposed to do.And the experience can still be terrible. Because customers don't experience departments.They experience what happens between them.

That's an important distinction.

So we could rewrite the email.

Make the language clearer. Improve the website. Redesign the form. Train the contact centre. Add another FAQ.

And sometimes that's exactly what's needed. But sometimes we'd simply be making a broken journey easier to understand. That's not quite the same thing as fixing it.

If customers repeatedly ask the same question, we'd want to know why they need to ask it. If people keep calling for updates, we'd look at what happens before the call. If staff are constantly explaining a process, we'd question whether the process makes sense. If customers are being passed between teams, we'd look at the handover rather than immediately retraining the people doing the handing over.

The visible problem gives us somewhere to start. It doesn't necessarily tell us where to finish.

Follow the problem, not the department.

This is where things get interesting.

A problem that appears in communications might lead us into service design. A customer-experience problem might lead us into an internal process. A process problem might turn out to be about ownership. And something everyone assumed needed redesigning might simply need removing.

That's why we don't particularly like forcing problems into disciplines too early.

We'd rather follow the experience across the organisation and see where it takes us. Sometimes the answer will be better communication. Sometimes it won't.

The joins matter.

Organisations need structures. Of course they do.

There will always be departments, systems, policies, suppliers, processes and people with different responsibilities. The challenge isn't getting rid of complexity.It's deciding how much of that complexity the customer should have to carry.

Ideally, very little.

A good experience can make an extraordinarily complicated organisation feel remarkably simple. Not because the complexity disappeared, but because somebody did the work behind the scenes to stop it becoming the customer's problem.

And that, for us, is often where the most useful work begins: not by asking how we make the organisation easier to understand, but why the customer needs to understand it in the first place.