I was sitting in a financial services firm's boardroom about eighteen months ago, watching their COO walk us through their onboarding process. Beautiful slide deck. Six clearly defined steps. Ownership at each stage. She was genuinely proud of it.
So we asked if we could follow a real client through it.
What we found: eleven emails, three phone calls, two separate people asking for the same compliance documents, and a three-week stretch where nobody contacted the client at all - because the handoff between sales and operations ran through a shared spreadsheet that didn't send notifications. The CEO had no idea. Why would he? Nobody had ever actually walked the whole path.
That gap between the process on the slide and the experience in real life? That's what I want to talk about.
There's a question I've started asking in almost every discovery conversation we have at Distinction. It's simple, and it makes people uncomfortable: "Who in your firm is responsible for the end-to-end experience a client has with you - from the moment they first land on your website to the moment they renew their contract three years later?"
The silence that follows is always telling.
Sometimes someone will say "marketing." Sometimes "operations." Occasionally a brave soul will say "everyone." Which, as we all know, is just a polite way of saying "no one."
And that's the problem. Not that your people don't care about client experience - they do. But caring and owning are very different things. Every team in your firm owns their slice. Marketing owns the website. IT owns the portal. Operations owns onboarding. Client services owns the relationship once it's up and running. The gaps between those slices, though - the handoffs, the inconsistencies, the moments where a client falls through the cracks? Nobody owns those. Because nobody can see them.
I was working with a 200-person consulting firm not long after that - good firm, strong reputation, loyal client base. They'd invested properly in individual touchpoints. The website had been refreshed eighteen months earlier. The client portal had been upgraded. The onboarding process had been documented and systematised. Taken in isolation, each piece was reasonable.
But when we mapped the full journey a new client went through - from first website visit to the end of their first engagement - the joins were a mess. The website talked about the firm's "collaborative, partnership-led approach." The proposal template used completely different language. The onboarding emails were clearly written by someone in operations who'd never read the website copy. And the client portal had a different visual identity entirely, because IT had built it two years before the website refresh and nobody had thought to align them.
The client wasn't getting a joined-up experience. They were getting four separate experiences, stitched together by assumption.
What's maddening about this: every team involved was doing good work within their remit. Marketing was proud of the website. Operations had genuinely improved onboarding turnaround. IT had reduced portal downtime. But nobody was standing far enough back to see the full picture. And the client - who doesn't know or care about your internal org chart - experienced the whole thing as one journey. A bumpy one.
We don't need another role. Everyone already has too much to do.
I hear you. And honestly, I agree with the sentiment. The last thing a mid-market firm needs is another layer of management or a shiny new job title that nobody quite understands. But I'm not arguing for a new hire. I'm arguing that someone who already exists in your firm needs to be explicitly accountable for something that currently has no owner. Because the absence of ownership is actively costing you money, and you probably can't see it because the costs are distributed across half a dozen teams.
Let me get specific, because "gaps in the client journey" sounds abstract until you see it playing out.
The handoff failure. A prospective client fills out an enquiry form on your website. Marketing gets the notification. They forward it to the relevant partner. The partner is busy - it's a Tuesday, they've got client work - so they flag it for later. Two days pass. The prospect has already spoken to a competitor who responded in four hours. You never hear from them again, and nobody in the firm registers it as a lost opportunity because it was never logged as one. Marketing thinks they did their job. The partner thinks they were going to get to it. The prospect thinks you're not that interested.
The duplicate communication. A client signs a new engagement letter. Operations sends a welcome email. The partner sends a personal note. Marketing's automation platform sends a "thank you for choosing us" email that was set up eighteen months ago and nobody remembered to exclude existing clients from. The client gets three emails in two days, each with slightly different information about what happens next. Not a disaster. But the kind of thing that makes a client quietly wonder how organised you really are.
The blind spot. Your client portal has a known UX issue - the document library is hard to navigate and search doesn't work properly. IT knows about it but it's on a backlog behind higher-priority security work. Client services knows about it because clients complain, but they've developed workarounds. Marketing doesn't know about it at all because they never use the portal. So nobody makes the case to fix it, because nobody sees it as their problem. Meanwhile, every client who struggles with it is forming an opinion about your firm.
The messaging disconnect. Your website positions you as "innovative and forward-thinking." Your proposal documents are Word templates that haven't been updated since 2019. Your onboarding pack uses language from a brand refresh that happened two brand refreshes ago. Each touchpoint was created by a different team at a different time. Nobody has ever audited them as a single experience.
I've seen every single one of these in the last twelve months, across law firms, consultancies, financial services firms, and MSPs. The pattern is remarkably consistent regardless of sector: good people, doing good work in silos, creating an overall experience that's less than the sum of its parts.
The ownership gap doesn't usually announce itself through dramatic failures. It shows up in metrics that drift slowly in the wrong direction - client satisfaction scores that plateau despite investment, renewal rates that soften by a couple of percentage points each year, NPS that's "fine" but never improves.
A couple of percentage points on renewal rates sounds modest. For a firm billing £5m annually with an average client value of £80k, losing two extra clients a year because the experience felt disjointed is £160k in recurring revenue. Gone quietly. Attributed to nothing in particular.
I spoke to the COO of a mid-sized law firm a few months ago who told me something that stuck with me. She said: "We lost three significant clients last year. When we did the exit interviews, none of them mentioned a single catastrophic failure. They all said something like 'it just felt like we were dealing with three different firms.'" That's the ownership gap in a sentence.
And the compounding problem is this: when nobody owns the whole journey, nobody is incentivised to invest in the connections between touchpoints. So every individual investment - the website refresh, the portal upgrade, the CRM implementation - delivers less than it should, because it's not being coordinated with anything either side of it. You keep spending money on individual touchpoints and wondering why the overall experience doesn't improve.
That's not a spending problem. It's an ownership problem.
If you want to put a framework around it, I've written separately about the Customer Experience Dividend - the idea that firms treating every client interaction as an investment rather than a cost see compounding returns over time. But you can't capture that dividend if nobody's job it is to see the whole investment picture.
Right, so if I'm not suggesting you hire a "Head of Client Journey" - please don't, the job title alone would cause a minor revolt at most partnerships - what am I actually suggesting?
At mid-market scale, say 100 to 500 people, a journey owner is almost always an existing senior role with an expanded remit. Three natural candidates, in my experience:
The COO or Head of Operations. Often the best fit because they already sit across multiple functions and think in terms of process and handoffs. The risk is defaulting to operational efficiency rather than experience quality - making things run smoothly internally rather than making them feel good externally. A good COO can hold both, though.
The CMO or Head of Marketing. Marketing already owns the top of the funnel and increasingly has a view of client data through CRM and analytics. The challenge is that their authority typically ends once a client is signed, so they need explicit backing to have a voice in onboarding, service delivery, and retention.
The Head of Client Services. They're closest to the client day-to-day and hear the complaints first. But they often lack the authority to change anything upstream - they can tell you the portal is frustrating clients, but they can't commission the fix.
The honest answer is it depends on your firm. What matters isn't which role gets it. It's that someone gets it. Someone who can walk into a meeting and say "I've mapped the journey from first click to renewal, here are the five biggest gaps, and here's what we're going to do about the top two this quarter." Someone with enough seniority to make things happen across departments.
Someone who gets measured on it. That last bit is important. If journey ownership doesn't appear in someone's objectives, it won't survive the first busy quarter.
I'm wary of making this sound like a twelve-month transformation programme, because it isn't. Here's what I'd suggest if you're sitting there thinking "we probably have this problem":
Name the owner. Have the conversation. Pick the person. Make it explicit. Don't just assume the COO is handling it - put it in writing, discuss it at a leadership meeting, give them air cover to ask uncomfortable questions of other teams. This takes an afternoon, not a quarter.
Map what actually happens today. Not what's supposed to happen. What actually happens. Get the journey owner to follow a real client's path through your firm. Talk to someone who joined in the last six months. Talk to someone who nearly left. Talk to the person who answers the phone when a new enquiry comes in. You'll find things that surprise you - and probably a few things that make you wince.
Identify the three worst gaps. Not all the gaps - the three worst ones. The moments where clients are most likely to feel confused, frustrated, or forgotten. Prioritise ruthlessly. Trying to fix everything at once guarantees you fix nothing.
Fix one gap. Quickly. Pick the easiest of the three and fix it in the next 30 days. Not with a big project - with a quick, visible improvement. Maybe it's aligning the language between your website and your proposal template. Maybe it's setting up an automated email that bridges a gap between signing and onboarding. Maybe it's creating a simple dashboard that shows where enquiries are getting stuck. The point is momentum.
Create a rhythm. The journey owner reviews the full journey quarterly. They bring the gaps to the leadership team. They make the case for the next fix. They track whether previous fixes are working. It doesn't need to be a formal governance committee - it needs to be a standing agenda item. This is essentially what our WHNN® framework does at a broader level: a quarterly cycle of review, prioritise, execute, measure. The same discipline applies here.
I want to be honest about timelines, because I've seen firms expect overnight transformation and get disillusioned when it doesn't happen. The first three months are mostly about discovery - understanding what's actually happening, identifying where the gaps are, building the political capital to fix them. It's not glamorous work.
But somewhere around month four or five, things start to shift. The journey owner starts connecting dots that nobody connected before. They notice that the portal complaint data and the client satisfaction scores are telling the same story. They realise that the onboarding delays marketing keeps hearing about are caused by a process gap in operations. They spot that three different teams are sending emails to new clients in the first week, and none of them know about the others.
That 200-person consulting firm I mentioned earlier? Six months after they gave their COO explicit journey ownership, they'd reduced new-client onboarding time by a third, consolidated five separate "welcome" communications into one coherent sequence, and - this was the one that surprised everyone, including me - discovered that 15% of their website enquiries were going unanswered for more than 48 hours because the routing was broken and nobody had noticed. Not a technology failure. An ownership failure.
None of those fixes required massive investment. They required someone with the authority and the mandate to look at the whole picture.
Every year, mid-market B2B service firms spend serious money on individual digital touchpoints - website refreshes, portal upgrades, CRM implementations, marketing automation. And every year, a meaningful chunk of that investment underperforms because it's not coordinated with the experience either side of it.
If you're spending £150k on a website refresh and the onboarding experience contradicts it within a week of a client signing, you haven't spent £150k on client experience. You've spent £150k on a front door that opens onto a building site.
A brilliant website that hands off to a clunky onboarding process. A slick portal that contradicts the messaging on the homepage. A CRM full of client data that nobody uses to personalise the actual client experience. These aren't technology failures. They're ownership failures.
You don't need a bigger budget. You don't need a new hire. You need someone - a specific, named, accountable someone - whose job it is to stand back far enough to see the whole journey and close the gaps between the parts.
If you're wondering whether your firm has this problem, try our Customer Experience Dividend scorecard. It takes about ten minutes and it'll give you a pretty honest picture of where the gaps are. Sometimes just seeing it laid out is enough to start the conversation.
Because the conversation is the hardest part. Once someone owns it, the fixes are usually surprisingly straightforward. It's the owning it that firms resist. And every quarter you resist it is another quarter where your clients are experiencing something less coherent than what you think you're delivering.