The Handoff Is Part of the Customer Experience
When a customer has to carry information from one department to another, your handoff has become their job.
They should have less work to do because they hired you.
To improve a handoff between sales and operations, pass along the reason behind each request, check what the next person can see, and name who owns the next step.
The customer sees one company.
That is the view I want leaders to keep. I have worked in both sales and operations, and a handoff looks different from each side.
A customer should not have to know who works in which department to get an answer. Inside the company, sales is done with its part. The order team is waiting on a detail. Delivery does not know that a request changed.
When a Check Gets Missed
A mistake in the location of a second peephole affected 324 doors on a multifamily order. It didn’t get caught in the checking process. The peepholes should have been at 52 inches, but they were ordered at 5 feet 2 inches.
The doors needed major rework, including Bondo and patching of all 324 peephole sites and redrilling the new ones. My entire leadership team was doing the work in the hottest week of August. The worst part was that the customer was inconvenienced, and the job was delayed. Checking that detail was part of our work for the customer, too. By the time we found the mistake, the customer had a problem to deal with.
Pass Along the Reason
A date, a size, or a location on its own leaves too much open. The next person could read it as a promise, a request, or a detail someone entered without checking.
A useful handoff note covers five things:
- What the customer needs.
- What was requested.
- What has been confirmed.
- Who owns the next step.
- What to check before anyone makes a promise.
The reason matters because it helps the next person judge a change. A detail on its own cannot explain which part of the job depends on it.
Compare What Was Sent With What Was Seen
Sit down with the person sending the work and the person receiving it. Use one real order.
Have the sender show what they believe they passed along. Then have the receiver show what they can see where they do the next task.
Look for the gap. A promise may live in an email. A change may sit in a text. A detail may be in the system but absent from the screen the next person uses.
Fix the place where the information gets lost. That might mean changing a field, a status, or the check before the work moves. The right change depends on the gap you find.
Name who owns the next step and who tells the customer if the plan changes. A shared file cannot take responsibility for either job.
Check the Next Handoff
Watch the next few orders through the same step. See whether the change helps people act or gives them another box to click while they work around it.
Start with one handoff this week. Get both people in the room and follow the customer’s request through it.
The customer may never hear about the fix. They should feel it in how little they have to chase.
