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Anticipation, communication, adaptability, and coordination: four lessons about customer strategy that I discovered where I least expected them—during a family trip to Morocco.
Some experiences stay with you because of one particular moment. With others, when you try to explain why they were so good, you realize there wasn’t a single extraordinary moment. Everything simply worked.
That’s what happened to me during a family trip to Morocco. Over the course of several days, we interacted with accommodation providers, guides, drivers, local coordinators, and the person managing our trip from Spain. Different people, different places, and plenty of moments when something could have gone wrong. Yet we experienced exactly the opposite: everything flowed.
And that’s what makes it so interesting from a customer experience perspective. Behind that apparent ease were behaviors that any company should pay attention to if it wants to build a customer strategy that customers can actually experience—not just one that exists on paper.
When everything works, the experience becomes memorable
I couldn’t pick a single moment from the trip and say, “That’s what made the experience exceptional.” It was the sum of everything.
From the moment we arrived at the airport, everyone seemed to know what they had to do and what we needed. They picked us up, accompanied us to the riad, helped us with our luggage, welcomed us with tea, explained what we could visit, and made themselves available if we needed anything.
And it happened again and again.
There was, however, one seemingly small detail that particularly caught my attention: the drivers arrived around ten minutes before the scheduled pick-up time.
I wasn’t expecting it. And that’s precisely why it made an impact.
Punctuality might seem like a basic service requirement. But when you’re traveling in a country you don’t know, relying on other people to get around, and following an itinerary, consistently finding your driver waiting for you removes a source of worry. You don’t need to call, check where they are, or start wondering what you’ll do if they don’t show up.
That small detail was repeated alongside many others. The guides were where they were supposed to be, the accommodation providers knew when we were arriving, the drivers knew where each passenger needed to be dropped off, and our luggage appeared at the next stop on the journey almost without us having to think about it.
From the outside, it looked simple. But the fact that the customer experiences simplicity doesn’t mean there isn’t complexity behind it.
Quite the opposite.
Anticipating customer needs requires doing the work beforehand
One of the things that contributed most to our experience was anticipation. Before we had to ask for certain things, someone had already thought about them.
And this is one of those customer-centricity principles that is easy to agree with and much harder to put into practice.
Many organizations talk about anticipating customer needs. But when it comes to actually doing it, different customer types, personas, customer journeys, contexts, channels, and exceptions all come into play. It can feel like an enormous amount of work.
So what happens?
Organizations end up designing a kind of “one-size-fits-all” solution. A process is created that works reasonably well for most people and, when a customer complains because that process doesn’t fit their situation, the organization takes note.
The problem with this model is that the customer has to be the one to identify our shortcomings.
Anticipation means doing some of that work beforehand. It doesn’t mean trying to predict every individual desire or designing a different experience for every single person. It means understanding customers and the moments they go through well enough to identify predictable needs and address them before they become a request—or, worse, a complaint.
One useful way to assess this in your organization is to look at how often customers have to ask for things that, from an internal perspective, were entirely predictable.
If it happens frequently, there is probably an opportunity for anticipation that you haven’t addressed yet.
Communication doesn’t mean constantly asking the customer
During the trip, Adela, the person we had organized everything with from Spain, stayed in touch with me. Every now and then, she would message to check that everything was going well and to make sure we knew she was there if we needed her.
But she wasn’t constantly asking questions.
There was an important reason for that: she didn’t need me to tell her everything that was happening. Her local partners were already keeping her informed.
That makes a big difference to the experience.
Sometimes we confuse customer follow-up with constantly asking how they are, how their previous interaction went, or whether they are satisfied. And while asking is necessary at certain moments, systematically making customers responsible for keeping us informed can end up creating exactly the opposite effect from the one we intended.
In our case, communication worked because it happened when it added value. I knew Adela was there, that she knew how the trip was progressing, and that I could turn to her if anything came up.
It felt like support, not surveillance.
Applied to customer experience strategy, there is a useful question to ask: how much does your organization know about what is happening to a customer without having to ask them again?
When teams share information and have visibility into the customer experience, communication can be much more relevant—and much less intrusive.
Adaptability doesn’t mean you can always solve everything
Something happened during the trip that helps explain another important aspect of the experience.
My daughter left a sweater behind at the riad in Marrakech. By the time we realized, we had already left, so we contacted them to see if we could get it back. They searched for it and tried to track it down in different ways, although unfortunately it was never found. By the time the message reached the person in charge, the sweater was no longer in the wardrobe and had probably been removed when the room was cleaned.
Why use something that wasn’t successfully resolved as an example?
Because a good customer experience isn’t about guaranteeing that every request will always have the outcome the customer wants.
What we experienced was a genuine willingness to help.
The situation wasn’t planned. It was no longer part of the itinerary we had booked, and it required someone to spend time trying to locate something that we ourselves had forgotten. Even so, they tried to solve the problem.
That’s how adaptability works. Processes are necessary to ensure consistency and efficiency, but they should leave enough room to respond when the customer’s reality doesn’t fit neatly into what was planned.
If an organization’s usual response to anything outside the norm is “the process doesn’t allow it,” the process may be working for the company, but not necessarily for the customer.
Coordination is invisible until it fails
There is one more element that completes the four major lessons from the trip and is difficult to ignore when analyzing the experience: coordination.
During those days, we interacted with many different people: drivers, guides, riad staff, accommodation providers, camp staff, and the people responsible for organizing the trip.
We saw different people, but we experienced one continuous service.
And that is incredibly difficult to achieve in a company.
Customers don’t usually think about the organizational chart when they interact with a brand. They shouldn’t have to care whether they are currently speaking to Marketing, Sales, Operations, or Customer Service. Nor should they need to know which external provider delivers part of the service or which system each department uses.
Yet in many organizations, internal silos end up becoming work for the customer.
Customers have to explain what they need all over again. One department doesn’t know what they discussed with another. A promise made by Sales never reaches Operations. Customer Service doesn’t have access to certain information. Every team may even be doing its job correctly and, despite that, the overall result can still be a poor experience.
This makes coordination a fundamental part of customer strategy.
Because optimizing every touchpoint independently isn’t enough if the connections between them fail.
A useful question for assessing your own organization is simple: when a customer moves from one team, channel, or provider to another, does the experience continue—or does it somehow start all over again?
A customer strategy can be recognized in what the customer experiences
After that trip, I could have come away thinking about Morocco, the desert, the riads, the landscapes, the guides, or the wonderful people we met.
But professionally, something else stayed with me: the feeling that I had experienced a genuinely customer-centric organization without anyone needing to tell me that it was one.
I could tell because they anticipated many of our needs. Because communication was present without becoming overwhelming. Because they tried to adapt when something unexpected happened. And because many different people managed to work together so that we experienced a single, seamless journey.
That is where a customer strategy stops being a statement of intent.
Look at what happens with your customers today: do they frequently have to ask for things you could have anticipated? Do your teams ask them for information that someone else in the organization already knows? Is there room to adapt when an unexpected need arises? Can customers see the boundaries between your departments?
If the answers aren’t what you hoped for, it may be that you still need to turn customer-centricity into a system capable of delivering it consistently.
And that, for me, is the most interesting question that experience left behind:
How do you get so many people, processes, and decisions to work together smoothly and seamlessly so that, from the other side, the customer simply feels that everything works?
Once you start asking that question within your own organization, you’re probably no longer talking about simply improving a few touchpoints. You’re starting to talk about customer strategy.
And if you want to bring that reflection into your own organization and explore how to turn customer-centricity into a consistent system, at Akuyari we can help you work through it.
Foto de Alex Azabache en Unsplash
