The Customer Who Had to Buy the Same Thing Three Times
Margaret wants carpet.
Not an experience.
Not a journey.
Not twelve exciting touchpoints with your brand.
Carpet.
She is seventy-two, recently retired, and ready to replace the flooring in her home.
She has money set aside.
She has no desire to become an amateur flooring expert.
She simply wants someone to help her choose the right product, install it properly, and leave her with a comfortable house.
This should be easy.
It won't be.
Purchase number one
Margaret visits a local flooring showroom.
A friendly salesperson helps her compare carpets.
They discuss durability, stain resistance, color, and how much traffic the rooms receive.
Margaret chooses one.
The salesperson explains that someone will visit her home to measure.
Perfect.
The next afternoon, the measurement technician arrives.
He asks:
“Which carpet did you choose?”
Margaret tells him.
He doesn't recognize the name.
She finds the brochure.
Then he asks whether the existing carpet needs to be removed.
Margaret explains that she discussed that yesterday.
Apparently, it isn't in his notes.
She explains it again.
The technician measures and leaves.
Margaret has now bought the project once.
Purchase number two
Two days later, Margaret receives the estimate.
Wrong carpet.
She calls.
Her salesperson is off.
Another employee asks whether Margaret knows the manufacturer's product number.
She does not.
Eventually they locate the correct carpet and revise the estimate.
Margaret approves it and pays the deposit.
Surely that's finished.
A week later, the installation coordinator calls.
“Will we be removing the existing carpet?”
Margaret closes her eyes.
Yes.
The carpet still needs to be removed.
Just as it needed to be removed the first two times she explained it.
The coordinator apologizes.
That information isn't in the installation notes.
Margaret asks whether removal was included in the price.
The coordinator isn't sure.
Someone will have to call her back.
Margaret has now purchased the same project twice.
Purchase number three
By installation day, Margaret has spoken with five employees.
She has identified her carpet several times.
She has explained the removal repeatedly.
She has resolved a pricing discrepancy.
The installation crew arrives.
They are excellent.
The carpet looks beautiful.
A week later, Margaret's neighbor asks:
“Would you recommend them?”
Margaret pauses.
The product was good.
The installers were good.
Everyone was friendly.
But buying carpet felt like a temporary administrative position.
She tells her neighbor:
“You might want to get a couple of other quotes.”
The company successfully completed the job.
It also created a customer who doesn't particularly want to send them another one.
The customer shouldn't be the integration system
This is one of the most common forms of customer friction.
The company has several internal systems.
The customer becomes the person responsible for connecting them.
Sales knows one thing.
Measurement knows another.
Scheduling knows something else.
Installation gets whatever survives the journey.
Every department may complete its own task successfully.
Yet the customer experiences the whole company as disorganized.
I call this the customer-as-integration-system problem.
Whenever information fails to travel internally, the customer is forced to carry it manually from person to person.
That's work.
And customers usually didn't hire you because they wanted more work.
Your customer doesn't see departments
Inside the company, there are reasons for the handoffs.
Sales.
Scheduling.
Operations.
Installation.
Billing.
Those divisions may be perfectly logical.
Margaret doesn't care.
To Margaret, she hired one flooring company.
She reasonably expects that the flooring company remembers which flooring she bought.
Customers don't distinguish between internal departments when assigning trust.
A promise made by sales belongs to the business.
A scheduling failure belongs to the business.
An installation surprise belongs to the business.
The customer sees one logo.
Handoffs are high-risk moments
Every time responsibility moves from one person to another, there is an opportunity for something to disappear.
Information.
Urgency.
Context.
Ownership.
Expectation.
I call these handoff gaps.
Some are obvious.
Sales to operations.
Estimator to scheduler.
Office to technician.
Others are less visible.
A voicemail nobody owns.
An estimate that has been sent but not followed up.
A customer who says “call me next month” and disappears because nobody has a process for next month.
The gaps usually aren't dramatic.
That's why they survive.
Nobody designed the problem
Businesses rarely create bad customer journeys intentionally.
They accumulate them.
A new form gets added.
A new software system arrives.
An employee creates a workaround.
The company grows.
A second department takes over something the owner used to do personally.
Each change makes sense in isolation.
Ten years later, the customer is explaining the same carpet removal to three people.
Nobody designed it.
It simply grew.
Follow the customer, not the paperwork
If I were examining a sales funnel, I wouldn't begin with a diagram of the company's departments.
I'd follow one customer.
What happens after they call?
Who knows what they said?
What happens next?
What does the next employee know?
Where does the customer have to repeat themselves?
Where can the process stop because nobody clearly owns the next action?
Where can expectations change?
This reveals something organizational charts often hide.
The spaces between responsibilities matter just as much as the responsibilities themselves.
Margaret didn't need a sophisticated customer-experience strategy.
She needed the second person she spoke with to know what she had already told the first one.
Sometimes fixing a sales funnel isn't about adding another stage.
It's about making the existing ones remember they belong to the same company.
