A student said Uber

Years ago, when I was adjunct faculty teaching a college course on sales, I asked the class what kinds of jobs they had. One student said Uber.

Uber was new enough that the answer did not immediately register as a sales job to the room. So we started pulling it apart. What makes a rider give five stars? The car being clean mattered. Promptness mattered. Helping with luggage might matter. Conversation mattered—and knowing when not to make conversation mattered.

Pretty soon the class was finding sales everywhere. I thought I was teaching them to recognize selling outside a sales department. I have come to think we were talking about something larger. We were talking about promises.

The loop can take twenty minutes or five years

In an Uber ride, the trust-and-delivery loop is compressed. A rider makes a choice, the driver arrives, the service is delivered, the rider experiences it, and the rating closes the loop. Promise and evidence may be separated by twenty minutes.

Now stretch the same architecture across a multimillion-dollar, multi-year enterprise contract. Sales may create the commercial promise, but Sales cannot make most of it true. Product has to perform. Implementation has to translate expectation into reality. Finance has to bill correctly. Support has to respond when reality diverges from expectation. Customer success has to maintain continuity over time.

The sale might happen on Tuesday. The promise could take three years to finish.

Trust becomes an organizational property

As the distance between promise and delivery increases, trust becomes less interpersonal and more organizational.

The salesperson may earn the customer’s trust. The organization has to keep it. Billing accuracy becomes part of the sales experience. Product reliability becomes part of the sales experience. Implementation and support become part of the sales experience. A renewal is partly accumulated evidence about whether the previous promise was kept.

Every box can hit its KPI and the promise can still fail

This is where local optimization becomes dangerous. Sales can hit its number by closing an agreement whose implementation complexity is invisible in the compensation plan. Product can hit roadmap commitments while a customer’s actual use case remains fragmented. Finance can optimize collections in a way that damages a relationship it cannot see.

Each function can be doing its job according to its own measurement while the customer experiences one organization failing to keep one promise.

The customer does not experience the org chart.

Traditional organizations often locate the sale with Sales because that is where the contract originates. But the contract is not the delivery. It is the promise.

The organization delivers it. The useful operating question is therefore not only ‘Who owns the customer?’ It is ‘What has to remain coherent for this promise to become true?’

Sometimes the distance between promise and delivery lasts twenty minutes. Sometimes it lasts five years. Trust is what accumulates in between.

I used to describe customer experience as a sequence: brand promise, customer expectation, company action, customer experience. I still think that is useful, but I would now add that every handoff inside the organization is itself a commitment.

The customer sees one promise. Internally, that promise fractures into dozens or hundreds of agreements about who will do what, when, with which information and resources. The contract may be signed once; the organization keeps—or breaks—it repeatedly.

Being the customer's advocate therefore requires more than good intent. It requires trust between the people responsible for carrying different pieces of the same promise.