A customer called a retailer and asked where their production facility was. Fair question. Their about page described them as a manufacturer.
They weren’t. They private labeled, which is completely fine. But the about page was written by the AI tool built into their store platform, and nobody checked it against how the business actually works.
Customer service told the truth. The customer felt lied to. The sale went to a competitor.
The full story, including what happened when sales called them back, is in They Called the Lead Back.
Three Teams One Customer
Inside a company, the website, sales, and customer service are separate jobs. Sometimes separate managers and separate inboxes too.
The customer doesn’t see any of that. They see one company. When the website says one thing and the person on the phone says another, they don’t think “miscommunication.” They think someone isn’t being straight with them.
In B2B that costs more than one order. These are buyers who reorder for years.
Where It Breaks
The usual weak spots are pricing, stock, returns, and quote follow-up. Here’s where I’ve seen it hold and where I’ve seen it slip.
Pricing. At ATL Rubber, I ran online pricing updates overnight or on weekends, when traffic was lowest. A buyer wasn’t seeing one number at 10am and hearing another from sales at 10:15. It also meant I could finish the update without getting pulled into something else halfway through. That was my call, and the timing held.
The pricing itself took longer to get right. For a while, the owner’s strategy was to put the lowest pricing tier on the website. The thinking made sense: better prices online should move more customers to order online.
What it actually did was set our own teams against each other. Counter sales, inside sales, and outside sales were all competing with the website. Customers were shopping us against ourselves.
Eventually we changed the website pricing to match counter sales and hoped for the best. It worked out. The internal competition stopped, and customers didn’t complain.
It also gave sales room to work with. If a customer needed a better price, a rep could offer a discount right there on the phone and win them back before they hung up. The website went from competing with the sales team to backing them up.
Stock. This is where it broke. During COVID, supply was tight and the online store didn’t sync with live inventory. A buyer could order something the site showed as available that wasn’t on the shelf.
I couldn’t fix the sync. What I could do was contact the customer as soon as I knew and mark the order urgent internally, so it got into the system and the inventory was allocated properly. Most buyers can handle bad news. Finding out late is what loses them.
Returns. Our policy was clear: custom and made-to-order items aren’t returnable. Everyone knew it. Customers still tried, sometimes calling a different branch to see if someone else would say yes. I get it. People are people. But that only works if someone gives a different answer. The policy holds when every branch, every rep, and the website say the same thing.
Quote follow-up. Quote requests from the site came to one person: me. They also went to management automatically, so nobody had to wonder whether quotes were getting answered. Most got a reply within a day.
Early on, though, they got stuck in limbo. The site’s outgoing email (SMTP) wasn’t working right, so a request could be submitted and never reach anyone. The buyer thought they’d asked. We didn’t know they had.
We found out when a customer called to ask why nobody had answered their email. The fix took a few hours to set up and test.
That’s the kind of break nobody sees from the inside. More on that in Quote Requests That Went Nowhere.
It doesn’t have to be a binder. It’s a few agreements everyone sticks to.
- One source for product info. Specs, pricing, and stock come from the same place whether the buyer reads them online or hears them on the phone.
- The same answers to the questions you get every week. Lead times, returns, freight, minimums.
- A clear handoff from website to sales. Who owns a quote request, how fast it gets answered, and who else sees it.
- Customer-facing copy gets read by the people who answer for it. That goes double for anything AI wrote. If sales or customer service would have to walk it back on the phone, it doesn’t belong on the site.
The website should answer what it can before the call 10 Things Buyers Need Before They Ever Pick Up the Phone and make the call easy when it happens ([Your Website Should Support the Phone Call, Not Replace It]).
One Piece Of Content, Every Team
The S.T.A.M.P.E.D. flyer is the best example I have of this working.
Customers placing custom orders kept leaving out key details. It slowed things down whether they called, walked in, or ordered online. So I made one branded flyer that showed them what we needed before they ever placed the order.
That one flyer ended up working for the website, the sales team, the counter, and email. Same info and same wording everywhere a customer might see it.
The full story is in [Build It Once, Use It Forever: How I Created 1 Flyer That Solved 4 Problems].
When The Cart Becomes A Shopping List
B2B buyers often build the cart online and place the order some other way.
I saw it all the time, especially when the person who needed the parts wasn’t the person doing the ordering. Someone in the field would build the cart, then send it to purchasing or the office manager to order from. More than once, what they sent was our abandoned cart email.
That only works if the cart, the email, and the person taking the order all show the same pricing and the same stock. If they don’t, the cart becomes the thing the buyer argues about instead of the thing they order from. More in [Why B2B Buyers Use Your Cart as a Shopping List].
The Business Case
Fewer repeat questions. Faster quotes. Fewer orders lost to a mismatch nobody caught.
None of it needs a new platform. Most of it is deciding who owns what and making sure everyone is reading from the same page.
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