When a customer places an order online and receives a damaged item, who do they hold responsible? The delivery company? Sometimes, but not usually. More often than not, a customer will blame the business that they made the purchase with. A cruise line may not be responsible for an airline losing a customer’s luggage, but the customer will many times blame the cruise line especially if the cruise line booked the plane tickets. 

This isn’t a strange phenomenon because, as humans, we group things together in our minds. It was one vacation experience and the customer only gave money to the cruise line. 

So if an online order arrives damaged, the customer may decide to never do business again with that particular delivery company, but chances are, the customer will instead decide to never again do business with the online company they purchased the item from. Of course, the online business does not always have complete control on the quality of the delivery, but if they do not package the item well or make bad decisions regarding delivery companies, they are the ones that will suffer from lost sales.

The customer views the transaction as one experience, not separate entities. The Customer Experience journey map is much longer than most organizations realize.