As a customer flows through a product or service, they're constantly but invisibly being handed from one team to another.

The marketing team will have primed their expectations through above and below the line advertising.

The SEM team will have contributed to this through the promises they make in their copy.

The SEO/SEM team will have dumped them somewhere on the site. Maybe a dedicated landing page. Maybe made by them or maybe by some CRO team. Or maybe they will have been sent straight to the home page.

The customer will then have to navigate through a website, probably run by multiple product teams. Marketing, on-boarding, identity, merchandising, check-out etc etc.

If it's a physical product, there may be a series of fulfilment and delivery teams involved.

If it's something like an airline, there'll be check-ins, lounges, gate agents, cabin crew etc

If something goes wrong they'll be customer success people, customer services people, accounts and payment teams, fraud teams. If it's not a simple problem you may be bounced to three or four different teams before finding somebody who can help.

Management teams always see their products and services as some sort of whole, seamless and joined up experience, but it's actually a patchwork—and often a poorly built one at that.

There are LOTS of gaps along the way, and plenty of opportunity for customers to get stuck.

This is why things like customer journey maps and service blueprints are so useful. Not only do they map the customer journey, but they also highlight the different teams, hand-off points, gaps and traps along the way. All are potential points for service failure.