The Coordination Gap:
Twelve Notifications, One Appointment, Zero Coordination
This month, I booked one routine service appointment. Before it was over, I'd received six automated notifications along with three emails and three calendar invites. Every message made sense from inside the department that sent it. Stacked together in my inbox, they looked like different companies who'd never spoken to each other.
That's the Coordination Gap: the space between how many people inside your company are authorized to send customers a message, and how few of them can see what the others already sent. Without an overall communication and personalization strategy, customers are left wondering who's actually on point.
According to CX Today, “Customer journeys often fail because individual departments optimize for their own specific goals.”
Source: How Fragmented Service Delivery Breaks Customer Journeys, CX Today
You invested in the system that was supposed to fix this which was to give you better visibility into the customer than you'd ever had. But in most complex-product companies, each department still notifies customers on its own timeline, for its own reasons: service closes a ticket and sends a survey, sales confirms a renewal date, billing sends an invoice reminder, ordering and shipping send three reminders of their own. None of it is wrong in isolation. All of it lands on the same person, in the same week, and quickly becomes noise. From the customer's side, it looks like you don't have your act together. And it doesn't earn you a five-star review.
A few questions worth asking your team this week:
Does the owner of your communication strategy have visibility into every department's customer notifications?
Who sets the communication and personalization strategy? Or is each team deciding on its own?
Are customer notifications ever audited across departments, or only within them?
Do your communication KPIs track volume, or just delivery?
Who owns the map of every customer touchpoint?
If nobody has a confident answer to all five, the Coordination Gap already exists in your organization. It's worth validating your KPIs to ensure you have the right measurements in place.
Left alone, the gap doesn't stay contained to one channel. It bleeds into every other touchpoint until you become the company that's difficult to do business with. When that happens, revenue is what's at risk, not just goodwill. Customers rarely leave over one bad email. They leave when the friction finally outweighs the reason they chose you in the first place.
Here's what I'd do next: the Heylo Diagnostic. I talk directly to your top customers, interview your commercial team and account leaders, and review the data to find where your Coordination Gap actually is. You walk away with a written plan your team can run, closing the distance between the customers you have and the customers you should be keeping.
The first call is free — sixty minutes to find out if there's a gap worth closing.