Building experiences across boundaries
Maija Bigestans
Manager
IXIA
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Narrated by Ellen Björck | 7 min
Summary
We tend to design brand experience one touchpoint at a time. But customers do not experience touchpoints, teams or channels in isolation. They experience the gaps between them. That is where we have the highest risk of trust being lost, promises weakened or the organisation revealing how fragmented it really is.
The problem is usually not one single touchpoint
A strange thing happens in large organisations. Individually, many parts of the customer experience can be very good. The website is clear. The salesperson is helpful. The product is well designed. The service team is competent. Each part can be improved, measured and optimised in its own right. And yet the overall experience can still feel disjointed.
The reason is often simple: nobody is really designing, or owning, what happens between those parts. And that part is tricky to control.
A customer moves from one channel to another and suddenly has to repeat everything. A promise made during sales does not survive into delivery. A digital experience feels thoughtful and premium, while the next physical interaction feels procedural and anonymous. The company knows who the customer is in one system and appears to forget them in the next.
That is why I think some of the most important brand experience work happens in a place we rarely talk about: the handover.
The moment one team’s responsibility ends and another begins is often the moment the customer experience becomes least intentional.
The brand breaks where ownership changes
Most organisations are structured around ownership. This team owns the website. That team owns sales. Another owns service. Someone else owns the app, retail environment or customer support. That structure is understandable internally, but it creates a blind spot.
The moment one team’s responsibility ends and another begins is often the moment the customer experience becomes least intentional. And this is where the brand gets exposed. Not because the logo is wrong, or the tone of voice changes slightly, but because the experience suddenly stops feeling like one organisation.
The customer is told to contact someone else. They are asked for information they have already provided. A previous conversation disappears. A carefully managed expectation is quietly reset. These moments are small, but they are revealing.
A handover is a promise being tested
Every interaction creates an expectation for the next one. If a company is easy to deal with at the beginning of a journey, the customer expects it to remain easy. If a salesperson is highly personal and informed, the customer expects that knowledge to carry forward. If a digital service feels intelligent and seamless, the next interaction cannot suddenly behave as if nothing came before.
A lot of brand work focuses on making promises clearer: what we stand for, how we speak, what kind of experience we want to create. But the handover asks a much harder question: Can the organisation actually carry that promise from one part of itself to another?
Customers should not need to understand the organisation chart in order to have a coherent relationship with a brand.
Seamless is not the same as invisible
There is a tendency in experience design to talk about making transitions seamless. That is useful, but I think it can also be misleading. Not every handover needs to disappear. Sometimes the customer should know that something is changing; A new phase is beginning, a specialist is taking over, responsibility is shifting. The problem is not that the transition is visible. The problem is when the transition feels like a reset.
A good handover can be explicit and still feel coherent. It can acknowledge what came before, explain what comes next and make it clear that the customer is not starting again. That is a very different ambition from simply removing friction.
We should be talking about continuity as a brand behaviour:
- Does the next person or system know what has already been discussed?
- Does the customer have to explain themselves twice?
- Does the tone of the relationship survive the switch from digital to physical?
- Does information travel with the customer, or do they travel alone?
- Does one part of the organisation make promises that another part cannot keep?
These are operational questions, but they are also deeply emotional ones for the customer.
If brand experience only operates where someone already has clear ownership, it risks becoming a layer on top of existing silos. The places where the journey crosses functions, systems and business areas. The places where no single team has full control. The places where responsibility becomes fuzzy and the customer feels the consequences. Those are difficult spaces to work in because they require collaboration rather than ownership.
Could the handover be where a real opportunity for building the brand lives? We won’t solve this challenge with another guideline, another perfectly polished touchpoint, or another designer in one team. To build that cohesive experience, we will need to find a way to build accountability for the parts that no single unit has ownership of, but that are a joint responsibility across functions. So perhaps, the brands that manage to build the capability to distinctively and purposefully work in those fuzzy areas in between will be the ones that create the most impactful brand experiences. They will be the ones able to turn shared responsibility into something people can actually feel.
Curious about what this looks like in practice?
Read From touchpoints to journeys: lessons from the unified driver experience, where Juan Wendeus shares how journey mapping helped the team look beyond individual products and understand where continuity is tested across the driver’s working day.