We're famously fond of a queue in this country. Less so, it turns out, when the queue is between us and a website.

Online queuing systems became a familiar sight during the pandemic, and their rapid deployment by retail teams was, on its own terms, an impressive bit of work under pressure. But they exposed something worth examining - because the frustration people felt in those queues wasn't really about the queue. It was about the gap between what a digital experience had promised them and what it was suddenly delivering.

And that gap is a customer experience problem that had nothing to do with the CX team.

The expectation you've already set

Customers have grown accustomed to what you might call the on-demand way of life. Products available instantly, at the touch of a screen. So when that ability is withdrawn - when you're told to wait in a virtual line to spend your own money - the dissatisfaction is disproportionate to the actual inconvenience.

And it doesn't attach to the queue. It attaches, quietly and subconsciously, to the retailer. The customer doesn't file it under "unusual circumstances". They file it under "you".

The multi-session reality

Here's the bit that changes how you should think about this. Most people assume a customer arrives, decides, and buys. In reality, a large portion of ecommerce revenue comes from journeys that span multiple sessions. Wolfgang Digital's KPI study found customers typically convert after something close to five visits.

That makes complete sense once you say it out loud. People shop around. They compare from the sofa, then again on the commute, then again at their desk. The speed of comparison is one of the reasons they came online in the first place.

And the data shows the pattern: the more a customer visits, the more likely they are to add to basket and eventually buy. Which means the businesses that reduce friction between sessions - so that the moment a customer's mind is made up, the purchase is effortless - hold a real competitive advantage.

Most of that friction is not owned by anyone with "experience" in their job title. It lives in load times, in session handling, in whether the basket persists, in whether the login works on a phone. It's technical. And it is absolutely a CX problem.

Most of the friction that loses you customers isn't owned by anyone with "experience" in their job title. It's owned by engineering, and nobody has told them it's a CX problem.

Why this is everyone's problem

This is the argument I actually want to make. When customer experience is a department, it becomes a department's problem - and departments have boundaries.

The CX team can design a beautiful journey. They cannot make the page load faster. They cannot decide whether the queue system is deployed thoughtfully or bolted on in a panic. They cannot fix the session that drops your basket when you switch device. Those decisions get made by engineering, by operations, by whoever was in the room when the deadline loomed - and they are, every one of them, decisions about how the customer will feel.

Which means the technical team is making CX decisions constantly, usually without anyone framing them that way. If nobody has told them their choices are experience choices, they'll optimise for what they were asked to optimise for: uptime, throughput, cost. All reasonable. None of them the same as the customer's feeling.

What to do about it

Not, I'd argue, hire more CX people. Embed the thinking instead.

That means engineers understanding what the customer is actually trying to do, and being given the standing to say "this will feel awful" - and be listened to. It means treating a technical constraint as a design problem rather than a fact of life. And it means, when a compromise has to be made under pressure, someone in the room asking what it will feel like on the other end.

With economic pressure making customers more careful about where their money goes, convincing them to spend it with you is not a marketing challenge. It's a whole-organisation one.

The question

The last significant technical decision your team made under time pressure - did anyone ask how it would feel to a customer? And if not, whose job was that?

If you can't name them, that's the gap.

Worth talking through? Book a short discovery call with the team at Distinction - no pitch, just an honest look at where your experience actually breaks.