Two things happened to me as a customer this month, and both of them were the kind of problem the company causing it will never find out about.
The form that frightened me
I'm selling a house. My realtor sent me a link to fill out the seller's disclosure form, which is a standard state form. The link goes to a commercial service that wraps the form and sells an insurance product alongside it.
From the first screen, the entire experience is fear. You will be sued. People like you get sued constantly. Here is testimony from people who were sued. Fill this out wrong and what happens next is your fault. And then, at the bottom, coverage: pay now, or pay more out of the proceeds at closing, or decline and formally acknowledge that you understood the risk you're taking with your family's future.
It worked. I was frightened. Which is the problem, because a frightened person filling out a legal disclosure does not go faster.
I told my realtor the experience was off-putting. She was, reasonably, trying to keep the paperwork moving, and said I was overthinking it. My answer was that if the tool made me feel this way, she should be overthinking the tool.
Here's the part that matters. The delay was manufactured by the vendor and charged to her. Her transaction is slower because a company she doesn't control decided fear converts.
The appointment I didn't attend
I needed an eye exam. I got the annual reminder, and I booked online, which I did specifically so I wouldn't have to talk to anybody.
A couple of days before, an email arrived saying they couldn't confirm my booking and I needed to call within a window or lose the slot. As far as I could tell that window had already closed by the time I read it.
So I didn't go.
Then they called to ask where I was.
Look at the shape of it. I used their preferred channel. Their system then required the exact interaction the channel exists to avoid, on a deadline that had passed, and the outcome was a no-show they experienced as my failure.
What both of these have in common
Nobody at either company has been through it.
That's the whole thing. Not incompetence and not indifference. In both cases there's a system running in the company's name, doing something to customers, that no one inside has personally experienced end to end since it was turned on.
And in both cases the company is a step removed from it, which is exactly what makes it invisible.
A vendor's software with your logo on it is you. The scheduling system was skinned in the optometrist's branding. As far as I'm concerned, they sent that email. The disclosure service is the realtor's process as far as any seller can tell. The customer doesn't hold a mental org chart. They experience one company and it's yours.
And the vendor is not optimizing for your customer. This is the part worth internalizing, because it isn't a bug in the tools. The disclosure service is optimized to sell insurance, and fear sells insurance. The confirmation flow is optimized to reduce the vendor's no-show liability by forcing an explicit reconfirmation. Both are working correctly. They're just working toward somebody else's goal, using your customer's patience as the raw material.
The story companies tell instead
Ask an office manager why no-shows are high and you'll get an answer about people. They don't show up. They don't respond. They don't read anything. You have to chase them.
Some of that is true. Most of it, in my experience, is a system producing an outcome and a company narrating it as a character flaw in the customer.
That story is comfortable, and it's expensive, because it's unfalsifiable from the inside. Once the explanation is that customers are unreliable, nobody checks the confirmation email, and the confirmation email keeps doing what it's doing.
There's a related version of this in why the disclosure tool exists at all. Realtors used to help clients fill out that form, and some of them got sued, plausibly because they'd pressured clients not to disclose things. So the industry moved to a third-party service. That's a rational response to real risk.
But notice what it optimizes. It protects the realtor. It does nothing for the client except frighten them, and it slows down the transaction both parties want. Protecting yourself and serving the customer are usually a tradeoff, and it's a legitimate one. What you don't want is the version where you pay the experience cost and don't even get the protection benefit, which happens whenever nobody checks what the protective thing actually does to the person on the other end.
This isn't only about third parties
The external stuff is the easy example. The bigger version is closer to home.
How many automated messages does your company currently send that nobody has read in two years? Not reviewed at a high level. Read, in the inbox, in order, in the sequence a real customer receives them.
Somebody wrote them. That person may have left. The product they describe has changed. A step got added, a step got removed, and the message still refers to both. There's a reminder firing on a schedule that made sense when the process was different, and a nudge for a feature that was renamed. None of this fails loudly. It just quietly makes you look like a company that isn't paying attention, one message at a time.
Go be your own customer
Not a review. Not a workshop where you diagram the flow on a whiteboard and everyone agrees it looks fine.
Sign up. Book the appointment. Fill out the form. Use the real thing, with a real address, at the real speed, and let every automated message arrive in an inbox you actually read. Go through the third-party pieces too, especially the ones with your logo on them.
It takes an afternoon and it's the highest-yield afternoon available to most companies, because what you find isn't a list of improvements. It's a list of things you'd have stopped immediately if you'd known, which have been running for years.
The customers who hit those things mostly don't complain. They just quietly decide what kind of company you are, and some of them don't come back, and you get to call that a no-show problem.
