The Right People Need to Be in the Room

In service delivery, this matters. A customer does not experience a business as separate departments. They do not see sales, projects, procurement, finance, account management and support as separate moving parts. They simply experience the service. So when those departments design processes separately, the customer can feel the gaps.

A common example is customer onboarding. Onboarding needs to be carefully coordinated, clearly communicated and properly delivered. It is often one of the first real tests of a customer's confidence after they have agreed to work with a business. It sets the tone for the relationship. If it feels organised, the customer is reassured. If it feels unclear, the customer can quickly start to question whether they made the right decision.

Sales may understand what has been promised. Projects may understand the delivery work. Support may understand the ongoing service. Finance may understand billing. Account management may understand the relationship. But if these teams are not brought together at the right point, the onboarding process can quickly become unclear.

And when something does not go smoothly, the customer is left wondering why the business is not joined up.

This is not usually caused by a lack of effort. Most people are trying to do the right thing. The issue is often that a process has been built around one part of the service, rather than the full customer journey.

That creates problems for employees too. Frontline teams can end up dealing with confusion they did not create. Engineers may be asked to resolve issues without knowing what was agreed earlier. Account managers may have to explain delays they were not aware of. Finance teams may receive billing challenges because the commercial process was not clearly joined to service delivery.

Everyone becomes busier, but not always more effective.

This is why interdepartmental processes need proper design. Not overcomplicated design. Not endless meetings. Just the right people involved early enough to ask practical questions.

But it is also important to be honest about who the right people are. The right people are not always the most senior people in the business.

Senior approval matters. Leaders are needed to make decisions, agree ownership and remove blockers. But approval alone does not mean the process will work in practice.

It is very easy for the wrong people to design and approve a process without having enough detailed knowledge to understand whether it can actually be delivered.

A process may sound sensible in a meeting. It may look clear in a document. It may appear to solve the issue on the surface. But if the people who deliver the work have not been involved, the business may miss practical details that only become obvious later.

This is how processes fail. Not because people do not care. But because the people designing or approving the process did not have the full picture.

That is why process design needs both authority and practical knowledge. Leaders are needed to approve the direction. But the people closest to the work are needed to make sure the process can actually be delivered.

The right people are the ones who understand the detail, the impact and the handover points.

For onboarding, that may include sales, projects, support, procurement, finance, account management and customer experience. Each team sees a different part of the journey. If one of those views is missing, the process may still look fine on paper, but fail in practice.

These questions can prevent a lot of avoidable frustration.

Once a process has been agreed, everyone who plays a part in it needs to understand their responsibilities. Not roughly. Not through assumption. Clearly. Because in a joined-up customer journey, one missed step can affect everything that follows.

If sales do not capture the right information, projects may start with gaps. If projects do not complete a clean handover, support may inherit issues without context. If procurement does not confirm timescales clearly, the customer may expect equipment before it is ready. If finance is not aligned, the customer may receive confusing invoices. If account management is not kept informed, they may struggle to reassure the customer when questions are raised.

Each individual step may seem small when viewed in isolation. But to the customer, it forms one experience. That is why responsibility matters.

When people do not understand their part in a process, the impact often shows up later, somewhere else. The person dealing with the customer may not be the person who missed the step. The team trying to fix the issue may not be the team that created the gap.

That can feel unfair for employees. It can also be frustrating for customers. They may not care which department was responsible. They simply want the service to feel organised, consistent and reliable.

This is where agreed processes need more than conversation. They need to be documented. Not to create unnecessary paperwork. But to give everyone a shared reference point.

People are busy. They forget details. Teams change. New starters join. Roles move. Processes are updated. What feels clear in a meeting can become unclear a few weeks later when someone is trying to complete the task under pressure.

A documented process helps protect against that. It gives existing employees something to check when they are unsure. It gives new staff a clear training guide. It reduces the risk of people relying on memory, assumptions or “the way we have always done it”. It also gives managers a fair way to support their teams, because expectations are clear from the start.

If a process is only understood by a few people, the business becomes dependent on those people being available, remembering every detail and explaining it consistently to others. That is risky.

When the process is written down, agreed and easy to find, it becomes part of how the business works, not just something discussed once and forgotten.

Documentation also supports accountability. If everyone can see the agreed steps, owners and handover points, it becomes much easier to understand where something has gone wrong and how to improve it.

That does not mean using the process to blame people. It means using it to protect the customer journey. Because if one stage is missed, delayed or completed differently, the impact may not be felt immediately. It may appear later as a confused customer, a delayed project, an incorrect invoice, a support issue, or a complaint that could have been avoided.

A process that sits in a folder but is not understood by the people delivering it will not protect the customer experience. But a process that is clearly documented, communicated, trained and reviewed gives teams a much better chance of getting it right.

There is also a commercial reality to consider. Businesses are busy. People do not always have time to attend every discussion. Sometimes decisions need to be made quickly. Sometimes a process has to be improved while the business is still moving. That is understandable.

But the cost of not involving the right people, not making responsibilities clear, and not documenting the agreed way of working can be higher than the time saved.

A process that misses a key department can create more work later. A process that is agreed but not properly embedded can lead to rework, complaints, delayed handovers, unclear ownership and difficult conversations with customers.

Service improvement is not just about fixing what went wrong after the event. It is about designing better ways of working before the same issues repeat.

Getting the right people in the room is one of the simplest ways to do that. Making sure they understand their responsibilities is the part that makes it work. Documenting the agreed process is what helps keep it consistent. And coordinating, communicating and delivering each stage carefully is what protects the customer's confidence.

So the next time a cross-department process is agreed, it is worth asking: if someone new joined tomorrow, or someone forgot the detail next month, would the process still protect the customer journey?