The unmanaged customer.

I asked an owner who owns the customer. She said everyone does. So I asked who I'd talk to on a Thursday if I wanted to know how many people had stopped coming that year, and she went quiet for a while. Draw the org chart of almost any business and you'll find somebody responsible for getting customers, somebody responsible for delivering to them, and somebody responsible for the money. You won't find anybody responsible for the customer after the first sale and before the next one. That space belongs to no one, and it's where most of the value sits.

This isn't negligence. It follows from something quite ordinary about how organisations work.

Things get managed when they have a number and a budget. Acquisition has both. You can count the leads, you can price a click, you can put a figure on a slide and hold somebody to it next month. So acquisition gets a person, a line in the budget, a dashboard, an agency, a standing Monday meeting, and somebody who takes it personally when the number dips.

The existing customer has neither. There's no line item called keeping people. Nothing arrives to tell you somebody has quietly stopped coming. The absence of a customer doesn't generate a document.

The usual answer, when you raise this, is that the customer is everybody’s job.

I've never seen that mean anything. It's the sentence organisations use for the responsibilities they haven't assigned. Everybody’s job describes safety and culture and tidiness, and those things also tend to slide, for exactly the same reason.

If nobody can be asked about it on a Thursday, it isn't being managed. It's being hoped for.

Now the argument against me, which I think is stronger than it first appears.

Some of what makes an existing relationship good is that it isn't managed. The practitioner who remembers your daughter’s name isn't executing a retention programme. The moment you formalise it, put it in software, and give somebody a target for it, there's a real risk you convert something human into something the customer can feel the machinery behind.

Everyone has received the automated message pretending to be personal. It's worse than silence, and the business that sent it thought it was improving.

So the objection isn't sentimental. Formalising a relationship can genuinely damage it, and I've watched that happen to businesses that were trying to do the right thing.

Where I've landed, and I'm not fully settled, is that the thing to assign is the noticing rather than the warmth.

Somebody should be responsible for knowing who has drifted. Not for producing feeling on a schedule. Knowing. The list of people who used to come and don't, kept current, looked at by a human being who is allowed to do something about it.

What happens next can stay entirely human. Often it should be a phone call from somebody who actually remembers them. The system finds them. A person decides what to say.

That split feels right to me and I'm aware it's convenient, since I build the finding half for a living. Take that into account when you weigh it.