---
title: "One customer request, five systems"
url: "https://pegamento.nl/en/technology/one-customer-request-five-systems/"
lang: "en"
type: "post"
description: "Ask any organization how many suppliers are involved in customer contact, and the answer is almost always surprising. There are often more than you can list off the top of your head. In most organizations, no one ever set out"
last_modified: "2026-09-28T06:02:09+00:00"
categories: [Technology]
translations:
  nl: "https://pegamento.nl/technologie/een-klantvraag-vijf-systemen/"
---

# One customer request, five systems

Ask any organization how many suppliers are involved in customer contact, and the answer is almost always surprising. There are often more than you can list off the top of your head. In most organizations, no one ever set out to plan it that way. It has gradually evolved over the course of fifteen years, bit by bit.

Marketing wanted to do something with social media and set it up on their own, because that could be done quickly. Support already had a phone system and expanded it as things got busier. When WhatsApp was added, it didn’t fit into any of the existing systems, so a separate small team was created for it. Sales had been working in a CRM for years and saw no reason to switch. And scheduling was handled through workforce management, in yet another system. Each step made sense at the time. Taken together, it has become a collection of systems that don’t communicate with each other.

### **Where the costs add up**

Management becomes expensive. Every interface has to be maintained, every vendor has its own releases and its own point of contact, and when a problem arises, it takes time to determine whose responsibility it is. In addition, innovation struggles to get off the ground because every plan immediately affects four contracts and four points of contact. What usually happens then is that the idea gets shelved until it’s no longer relevant.

Forrester has noticed this as well. Its predictions for 2026 state that organizations need to simplify their systems and use fewer vendors.

Customers notice this too, though they might put it differently. They ask one question and get a different answer for each channel. That’s because people don’t have a “channel-specific” question. They have a question and choose a channel—and sometimes switch to a second one partway through. Often, it even starts outside your own channels. In 2025, Gartner studied how nearly 5,800 customers resolve their issues. But only 22 percent stay within the company’s own channels from start to finish. If your organization is structured by channel, you can’t follow that flow, and the conversation starts over every time.

### **Where You Start**

It’s very tempting to start with the systems, because they’re visible and have a price tag attached. In practice, however, it’s more productive to first identify which questions are coming in, where they end up, and who feels responsible for them. It often turns out that the same question is being answered in three different places, by three different teams, with three different answers.

Next comes the question of who’s in charge. Consolidation projects rarely fail because of technical issues. They fail when no one high enough up in the organization takes ownership, because then everyone sticks to their own little corner and the initiative gets lost in the discussions. Once that’s taken care of, the technical side becomes much clearer: what can be removed, what stays, and what needs to interface with what.