Everyone is a customer at some time in their lives so you'd expect it would be easy to think like one. However that's not always the case. With the current pandemic, more goods and services are being ordered on-line than ever before, which means that there are more customers waiting on their goods and services than ever before.
Supply chains are not perfect and delays can occur, but the best organisations keep their customers informed along the journey, from order to delivery, and those are usually the ones that receive return business. The worst ones expect the customer to call to find out what's happening and they usually don't get return business. The story is the same outside of consumer land, where the cost of delays may be considerably larger, both materially and to reputation.
The importance of keeping the customer informed can often be lost in the heat of the moment, unless it is built in to the process during design. There is an old saying about being treated like a mushroom, which is that it likes to be kept in the dark and fed with manure. That's good for mushrooms but not for people, so when designing your next process, be sure to consider where it can fail and build in appropriate feedback to your customer, whether the news is good or bad. Even though mushrooms are good to eat, nobody really appreciates being treated like one.