Written by: David Carneal – Digital Efficiency Consulting Group – DECG
Read Time: 3 min
Organizations spend enormous time deciding how customers are supposed to move through a process. Portals are built. Instructions are written. Systems are configured. Employees are trained. Then customers show up and do something irritatingly human: they find the path that works best for them.
That behavior is easy to label as noncompliance. A customer calls instead of using the portal. Someone emails a purchase order instead of entering it online. A guest takes a different route through a building or facility. The instinct is often to reinforce the official path with more reminders, more instructions, or more training. But repeated behavior deserves a different question: what is the alternate path accomplishing that the designed process does not?
I saw this play out during a recent cruise. Experienced guests consistently bypassed crowded elevators, chose different walking routes, adjusted meal times, and ignored several intended guest flows entirely. None of them had coordinated. They had simply learned, through observation and experience, how to get where they wanted to go with less friction. Thousands of people were effectively redesigning the workflow in real time.
The Customer Is Optimizing for a Goal
The organization is optimizing for control, consistency, staffing, technology, and throughput. The customer is optimizing for one thing: getting the result they came for with confidence, clarity, and the least practical effort. Those priorities overlap, but they are not identical.
That difference matters. When many customers independently choose the same alternate channel or shortcut, it stops being a random preference. It becomes operational feedback. The behavior is telling you something about accessibility, sequencing, trust, timing, or usability.
A Quick Observation Audit
- Where do customers leave the intended process?
- Which alternate path do they choose instead?
- What does that alternate path make easier, faster, clearer, or safer?
- Does the same behavior repeat across different customers?
- Are employees quietly helping customers bypass the official process?
The answers do not automatically mean the workaround should become the new process. Some shortcuts create risk. Some exist because expectations are unclear. Some may even create more work downstream. But the behavior is still useful because it identifies where investigation should begin.
A process map describes intent. Customer behavior reveals reality. If those two versions of the workflow are consistently different, defending the map is not process discipline. It is choosing the drawing over the evidence.
Small improvements often start here. Watch where people hesitate, repeat questions, abandon steps, switch channels, or create their own routines. Those moments are not background noise. They are the customer showing you where your process and their reality have stopped lining up.
There is another reason this kind of observation matters: customers often discover friction faster than internal teams do. Employees may understand why a step exists, know which button to press, or know who to call when something breaks. Customers do not have that institutional knowledge. They experience the process exactly as it presents itself. That makes their behavior especially valuable. If they consistently hesitate at the same point or abandon the same step, the process is exposing its weakness without needing a formal complaint.
This also changes how customer feedback should be interpreted. Surveys capture what people remember and choose to report. Behavior captures what they actually did. Both matter, but when the two disagree, the behavior deserves attention. A customer may say the experience was fine while quietly avoiding half of the intended journey the next time they return.
CTA: Pick one customer-facing workflow this week and observe it without correcting anyone. Document the alternate paths people create before deciding what needs to change.