Customer experience (CX) is still a relatively new business discipline. It’s often understood as the process of understanding and managing customer’s interactions with a brand to create positive experiences at every touchpoint.
What’s less clear, is how to do that successfully within an organisation.
Rethinking and shaping what CX is as a business discipline, led me to the idea that “CX is a team sport”.
As a former athlete and world champion in a team boat, I understand the significance of a successful team dynamic and its impact on achieving success. Working with clients in my consulting business, I believe that this is the missing link for CX to be successful.
CX is a team sport – what do I mean by that?
Treating CX as a collaborative effort is a mindset shift that can be challenging to achieve as organisations are built around departmental silos, often leading to cultural silos as well.
Every function within an organisation has a specific role to fulfil and leaders rarely spend time considering the impact their actions have on other teams, let alone the wider customer experience.
That becomes particularly apparent when mapping a customer journey end-to-end, across all teams and departments.
Whether it’s sales fuelling the churn bucket by overpromising on deals; marketing pushing to launch a product that’s not quite ready for launch; or internal teams simply unclear on communications responsibilities, making it the customer’s job to find resolution; organisations aren’t typically designed to provide a great experience end-to-end.
That needs to change.
CX needs a holistic approach
Leaders must work collaboratively with their peers to understand CX holistically, and the impact that every single part of the organisation has on a customer.
Data and technology play a crucial role in understanding and enabling customer experiences, yet data flow and availability is often limited by either technical constraints or cultural barriers, restricting data and insights sharing across the organisation.
Customer insights need to be collected and shared across the organisation, to enable an organisational wide understanding of CX. But to foster collaboration across all teams, organisations must break down not only operational and technology siloes, but cultural siloes.
Journey mapping is a great way to visualise what experiences are like for customers, and the impact every department and every single person in the business has on the customer. Creating and sharing a journey map often acts as a “aha moment” to understand customer experiences holistically and assist empathy building.
CX isn’t just a frontline job
It’s often seen as the job of frontline staff, or those with CX in their title to manage the customer experience. In reality though, every single person in the organisation impacts the customer experience. From product development, pricing, sales, marketing, to legal.
Even policy decision makers and technology teams impact experiences with the decisions they make.
While CX is everyone’s job, organisations still need a “CX function” that governs and orchestrates the CX activities and supports every department and team within the organisation.
But CX leaders need to tread carefully and bring their colleagues along on the journey to be successful. It’s about understanding the priorities and needs of other functional leaders across the business and tying those to CX outcomes and wider business objectives and growth.
All leaders must collectively and holistically understand their impact and intentionally design experience for customers and employees.
Designing experiences across organisations requires a mindset shift
That is a mindset shift all leaders must understand and buy into. No single team ‘owns’ the customer, and no single team can control the customer experience, end-to-end.
Just like any successful sports team needs to work together to win the race, so do organisations.
No team will ever win a race or a game if all players have their own agenda. All team members need to buy into a shared goal and understand their part in achieving that goal.
Yet, in organisations that’s not always the case.