The Customer Doesn’t See Your Process. They Feel It.
Your customers may not see what happens behind the scenes, but they feel the impact when something goes wrong.
In this compilation episode of The Breakout Moment, Christina May revisits conversations with business leaders about how communication, internal processes, and accountability shape the customer experience.
From managing expectations to preventing missed handoffs, discover why delivering on your promises takes more than getting the job done.
COLD OPEN
Brett Snyder: It's the small things that your people are doing that your client may not see at all.
Jeff Schwartz: And we like that. We want our clients to help hold us accountable when we make a mistake.
Denny Woolley: Then you have that process that you're checking to make sure what? That it's what you promised the customer and what the customer expects to purchase from
CHAPTER 1: THE PROMISE
When a customer hires your business, they're not thinking about your internal processes. They don't know how your departments communicate, how projects move from one person to the other, or what happens behind the scenes to get the job done. But every one of those decisions affects their experience: a missed handoff, a delayed response, a promise that never makes it to the person responsible for delivering it.
Sound familiar? Those little things can make the difference between a customer who trusts you and one who just simply doesn't. And across our conversations with business owners, we've heard just how much of the customer experience comes down to the work that the customer never, ever sees, because two customers buying the same service might have completely different expectations about what that looks like.
Denny Woolley talks about that challenge at Genesis. And Brett Snyder shares what happened when a long time client asked his company to take on a very different type of project.
TBM #22 | Where Experience Meets Innovation with Denny Woolley
Denny Woolley: Most companies manufacturing, they have some type of quality process. Right. Something that they want to check before it goes out to the customer.
CM: Yeah. I think most people would be able to understand that concept. Whereas maybe life sciences is a little harder for some of us who aren't in the space to really…
You think of guys in lab coats and some magic happens back there, right? But, you know, for us, manufacturing a manufacturing line, the goal is, you know, one widget looks like the other widget, regardless of what the widget is, right? Whether it's a vaccine or car or Frisbee.
DW: Yes. Right
CM: Right.
DW: But then you have that process that you're checking to make sure what? That it's what you promised the customer and what the customer expects to purchase from you. Right. So another aspect of Genesis’s breakout, I believe, is the ability for our people to sit and listen to the customers because everyone’s story is different.
No matter what you're doing, you try and pigeonhole them into similar type categories. There's always something that's nuanced and different.
TBM #5 | No Big Bang: How Small Business Decisions Create Big Business Shifts with Brett Snyder
Brett Snyder: He called me one day and he said, Brett, I'm on a board of a private school in DC. I'm on the board. We're getting ready for a massive expansion.
We're not doing well with our current CM who kind of got us through pre-contract kind of stuff. Would you guys come in? And because I think I trust you guys, and I just want you to interview and talk to the school about the process. And I was like, are you sure you want us? We don't have school work.
We don't I don't have a staff that have done, you know, you had one staff who three years ago had done something for, you know, where they were and were like, I don't know what I don't know
CM: I don't know what I don't know.
BS: Like, are you sure you want us? And he was like, Brett, you guys know how to build, right?
Like, you guys know, you know how to take care of people and you take how to take care of clients, which is what I am. And it's just it's different because it's now reporting to a board or reporting to people who don't know real estate.
CM: Right.
BS: Like you're all sudden you're explaining a little bit more, you're walking them through the process and you're letting them know where the risks are, because they're not like a developer who's done it a hundred times or 20 times or 30 times.
And so we're like, okay, I think we could do that. Like I have to tweak a few things or get the right staff person.
CHAPTER 2: BEHIND THE SCENES
Getting the work done is one thing. Keeping everything moving is another.
Dondre Lawson talks about how our expectations around speed have changed, and Brett Snyder shares a moment when he realized a roomful of experts could spend hours together and still leave without knowing what comes next.
TBM #10 | Automation, the Human Touch, and Why Every Business Needs an Intern with Dondre Lawson
Dondre Lawson: And so I think really the paradigm change for everybody started when Amazon got as good as they are with shipping. Right. If you look at Amazon's operations and what they do inside the warehouses – there are complex systems to get your $6 package to your house in a day, right?
Like monolithic, ridiculous, complex systems to say, how fast did that package get shipped to you, right? Like, if I order something in my house, it's there within a day, and I expect everything to be that way. Even with our employees and some of the work we do, unless it's, you know, something that's large for us to do, I'm like, hey, we should be able to really get that done in a day or two.
And it should be like a week. But my brain subconsciously is telling me that, hey, we can knock this out.
TBM #5 | No Big Bang: How Small Business Decisions Create Big Business Shifts with Brett Snyder
BS: We would go to meetings with clients and I kind of go through exactly where you're at.
We'd go to a meeting in the morning, my partner and I, and we'd sit there and there be really smart people in the room because we thought we were just in meetings and stuff. Sometimes to be the smart people in the room, to kind of guide them.
CM: If you’re the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.
BS: No, no, no. And we realized everyone else in the room smarter, like they're in their silo. They're they're they're the best of the best. You know, some fabulous names of downtown DC architects, you know, like the top of their field. And we get to the end of the meeting. And this one day, it was this double meeting of we did it in the morning, and we walked out of the meeting and like kind of nothing really happened, right?
Like there was no like, like follow up. I'm not sure if people were on the same page. And then we walked into a meeting in the second part of the day, a whole different group of people, smarter people, you know, a boardroom of people that know their niche better than anyone. And again, we walked out thinking, I'm not sure they actually… like I'm not sure what they're doing.
We left the room saying, I'm not sure anyone's going to bring back to the next table, you know, to the next meeting. Anything different because there was no direction. So the following meeting, we were just like, if the last five minutes, we were just like it was happening the same way. We finally just said, can we have five minutes, like, “do you know what he needs from you before the next meeting, so we don't sit here and have the same conversation again?”
And he's like, “no, what does he need?” And then let that guy talk. It's like, “oh, you need that?” So he would write that down and we're like, “okay for you to get that, what do you need from them?” And they're like “oh I need this.”
I'm like, okay. So like you get him, you know, like so it just became this orchestra of like playing around the table of who needs what from whom to move anything forward. Or it was just gonna be really smart people sitting in a room without direction and without kind of knowing what that key stuff is that, like, are we really looking at the right thing?
BS: Right? Are we really focused on how are we moving forward on these projects or how are we, you know, how are we getting to that next step? And it's just a lot of it's asking questions.
CM: Yes.
BS: And figuring out what that person needs. Like. And so we spent a lot of our time, especially with our young folks. Like, are you making sure everyone walks out of every meeting you have with that next thing?
Like with that, everyone has clear direction on what they're going to do before you all get sit down and room again and just talk.
CM: I think that alone is some of the best advice that you could give somebody, no matter what their age is.
CHAPTER 3: LOST IN THE HANDOFF
Now, think about what happens when those gaps exist inside your own company. The customer talks to one person, then another, then another. But is everyone working from the same information? Stacey Holsinger and I got into this in one of our earliest episodes, particularly what happens between sales and the people responsible for delivering the work.
TBM #2 | AI, Cohorts, and Tipping Points: Our 2025 Breakout Moments
CM: Sales team. First thing they do is either everything's great, but as soon as everything's not, what do they do? They blame the leads. They blame the marketing team. But there's no transparency between the two departments. Same thing when it comes to customer service sales.
Hands it off. Done. Whatever. And then the service team is the ones that's on the front lines to either actually execute the thing that you do right, or follow up on the warranty or whatever else. Right. And these poor folks don't know what was sold, right? They have no source of truth as to what was said to the customer, what was promised to the customer.
How long has this conversation been? When a when a person interacts with your company, it should feel like one nice long conversation, right?
Stacey Holsinger: A nice trail that you can go back to go back to.
CM: It should be a great experience all the way through. And then you, Mr. and Mrs. Founder Owner, we can actually answer the question of what's going on with your customer.
Where did they come from? Where did you lose them? But unless we un-silo each one of those departments and actually, you know, you can tie that into ops, you can tie that in your operations. If your manufacturing can tie that into your ERP, whatever, we can really start to unlock some big findings in the data. And then it becomes kind of this engine that moves forward together so suddenly, instead of the people that are working from you blaming each other.
They're actually focusing that blame on where the problem lies. And we can use data points across the entire organization as opposed to just in departments.
SH: And you can all work together.
CM: To all work together to figure it out. And your forecasting becomes more accurate. Your customer retention jumps. It's just, it's huge. It's powerful. It's a big thing. You can tell I get really excited about it.
CHAPTER 4: THE ACCOUNTABILITY TEST
So what happens when something does go wrong and things do go wrong? Jeff Schwartz has built a way for his clients to give his company direct feedback, even when that feedback isn't exactly what you want to hear.
And Aaron Shapiro has a simple rule about bad news that I think every business owner can learn from.
TBM #11 | Building Culture and Creating Community with Jeff Schwartz
Jeff Schwartz: No matter what, if you have a vision statement or you have a culture, if you think you don't have a vision statement or you have something, you have something.
CM: You have something, yes you do.
JS: You can either formalize it and help mold it, or you can just let it evolve, let it happen, whatever is going to happen. And so we made a big, meaningful step. And we started this for 30 to 30 fundamental program. And some of and rather than having a vision statement on the wall that you expect everybody to memorize and everything, the 30 fundamentals to us are more about the behaviors, the actions that we want for our company, how we treat our clients, and to me, their small, short, simple.
We do a new one each week. Some people say 30s, too many. We could argue about that however long you want, but the fact is they give us a common language. And whether it's be fanatic about response time, whether it's, you know, think safe, work safe, keep things fun, make healthy choices, I believe that they they just provide these guiding principles.
If you're not sure or if you're having a difficult inner office conversation, it everybody sort of can speak the same language and help hold everybody equally accountable across the board, and we get feedback from our clients. It's on every email that goes out and seen it. If we've dropped a ball or something, oftentimes the clients will read our fundamental of the week and remind us that we missed it.
And we like that. We want our clients to help hold us accountable when we make a mistake.
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Aaron Shapiro: The one thing we say is, like bad news early is good news.
CM: Okay.
AS: Like, if you made a mistake, let us know. And we're not going to scold you for that. We're going to like, embrace that. And now you have a team to, like, work together and like fix your mistake. Where it starts to get out of hand is when you make a mistake and you hide it and you try to not, and then it snowballs into something that no one can fix.
CM: And it's at the 11th and a half hour. And if you'd been proactive, I had always tell people time is options. If you tell me sooner, I have more options. If you wait to the very end, I am suddenly completely out of options and we're going to be in trouble. Like I would please tell me in the beginning.
AS: Right. So that's something as a leader to when you get bad news like your blood is going to boil and your natural reaction is to get upset, but you have to think that person like, thank you for telling me, thank you for coming to me. Because if you were to hear it from a client or, you know, that's that's a lot worse than the person coming to you with a mistake.
CM: Absolutely,
THE INVISIBLE WORK
The common thread here is that the customer experience isn't just about the finished product, it's about everything that happens along the way.
So, here's an actionable tip and something I want you to try. Follow one customer through your business from their first conversation to that final delivery.
Where could information get lost? Where could expectations get missed? And just start eating the elephant and fixing one of those gaps, each one at a time.
Because your customers don't need to see every part of your process, they just need to trust the result.