Feature
The Gist
- Cross-department collaboration. Establishing a cooperative model across departments is critical for an effective customer experience model, facilitating a unified approach toward enhancing customer interactions.
- Empowerment as a change agent. Encouraging a culture of change and adaptation helps in navigating existing company cultures toward a customer-centric model, leveraging existing organizational frameworks.
- Customer-centric culture. Embedding customer-centricity within the organizational culture, driven by leadership and clear communication, helps in aligning departmental goals toward improving overall customer experience, making the organization more receptive and responsive to customer needs.
Customer experience leaders want better cross-department collaboration, empowerment as an agent of change and the ability to change company culture to become more customer-centric and establish the right customer experience model.
Those are the top three reasons CX leaders gave when asked the most critical factors to establish the right CX organizational model. The analysis comes in a survey about customer experience organizational models shared by the Experience Alliance.
“I might sound like a nut in saying this, but I think we spend way too much time talking about, and pushing, culture change,” said Jeb Dasteel, former global chief customer officer at Oracle, one of the founders of Experience Alliance and a CMSWire Advisory Board member. “For the most part, a company’s culture is what it is. The trick is to play into that and figure out how to utilize aspects of the existing culture to achieve your objectives.”
Today is Part 1 of a mini series about building out a customer experience organizational model. Today we’ll examine insights into establishing a collaborative CX model, followed by:
- Leading Transformation Toward Customer-Centricity
- Nurturing a Customer-Centric Culture Within Existing Organizational Frameworks
What Is a Customer Experience Model?
NICE has a solid definition on what a customer experience model actually looks like:
“A customer experience model is a framework businesses use to control the quality of the impressions their customers receive about the brand. The model can include vision, standards, goals, desired customer emotions and actions, measurement details, and responsibilities, and should be aligned with the business strategy.”
However, as far as building an actual customer experience model, it's never as simple as just ownership of resources and to whom you report, Dasteel wrote in a January CMSWire article on designing an actual customer experience organization. As you look to build a new CX program or tune the one you’ve got, consider five factors:
- What are the core cultural characteristics of the company?
- What key capabilities and priorities define the CX strategy?
- What is the best approach for exerting authority across the organization to develop and execute the CX strategy?
- Who does, or should, the CX executive report to?
- How are peer-level partnerships managed and which partnerships are the most important?
As with any other key strategy for the company, organizations need to look at each of these to guide us on organizing for effective and efficient CX, he added.
“The organizational key is to have the courage to consolidate from a siloed, channel-centric internal organization to a more modern integrated customer experience organizational model,” Alan Schulman, co-founder of UpperRight, a customer experience consultancy, shared in a LinkedIn post. “That may seem obvious, but many brand marketers are still sitting in siloed ‘inside-out’ organizations struggling to gain control of their websites, social listening, even customer data.”
Related Article: 9 Building Blocks Toward Exceptional Customer Experience
Ensure Inter-Departmental Collaboration Design and Delivery of Customer Experiences
So how do you get that cross-departmental collaboration going en route to building out your customer experience organizational model?
Every Department Must Understand Role Toward Great CX
A good amount of the work starts with alignment on the front end. Brianna Langley Henderson, customer experience and marketing regional manager at Waste Connections and a CMSWire Advisory Board member, told CMSWire her organization aligns goals and objectives interdepartmentally on the front end.
“When every department understands their role in contributing to the end customer experience, they are more likely to work collaboratively,” Langley Henderson said. “In a perfect world, I think this would be facilitated by regular communication, such as department-wide meetings, email updates, or using a shared communication platform.”
Form cross-functional teams for specific CX projects, she said, and include representatives from different departments. This provides a platform for everyone's voice to be heard in the implementation process.
Unite Multiple Departments With Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping also brings people together. Creating a visual representation of the customer's interaction with the company helps all departments understand how their role fits into the larger picture, according to Langley Henderson.
How did that customer journey mapping look in practice? Her company’s residential ecommerce process needed an update. It decided to involve as many departments and layered voices as possible. The project kicked off with a full-afternoon meeting on a Friday, involving members from IT, SEO, Marketing, UX Design, Website Management and Sales.
“They decided to use the customer journey mapping tool to visually represent their customers' interactions with their online store,” Langley Henderson said. “Everyone contributed perspective and differing insights, based on their own work and experiences.”
The result? A redesign of the online storefront in a way that significantly enhanced the customer experience. “The new design was easier to navigate, more responsive and tailored to the needs and preferences of our target audiences,” Langley Henderson said. “This led to an increase in customer engagement, as well as a significant boost in recurring revenue across the enterprise.”
Leadership “can’t be overstated,” Langley Henderson added. “Leaders need to set the tone by demonstrating collaborative behavior themselves, thus fostering the right type of culture in which collaboration can thrive.”
Establish a Cross-LOB Community, Bake in Voice of the Customer
In Dasteel’s time as CCO at Oracle, he helped establish a cross-LOB community, internal to Oracle. It included:
- Sales
- Development
- Support
- Professional Services
- Marketing
- Alliances & Channels
- Regional Leaders
- Finance
“We had virtually every single LOB, engaged in a tightly-facilitated series of weekly calls,” Dasteel said. “We encouraged subgroups to get together on specific challenges or opportunities as well. I had one very senior level person and her team manage this. This one effort probably did more to foster cooperation and collaboration across the company than anything else did.”
His past teams published Voice of the Customer (VoC) reports and then went around the company and around the world to host workshops to review LOB-relevant feedback, along with a recommended plan of action.
Oracle then also had what it called a Top Ten program, where it identified the top 10 key customer feedback themes that had the most dramatic effect on overall customer sentiment. “Where those themes were relatively straightforward, affecting a single LOB, it was up to that LOB to address the theme and get it off the Top Ten list,” Dasteel recalled. “Where the themes were more complex and cross-LOB in nature, we program-managed root cause/corrective action processes across the company to address the issues.”
Set Measurable Tasks to Improve CX Internally and Externally
Nichole Hinton, owner and principal consultant at LYSI Holding Company, former director of customer operations at SecureAuth Corporation and a CMSWire Advisory Board member, said she formed a similar cross-departmental collaboration, a well-managed “rally cry” that was co-developed between the executives with the customer in mind.
“The measurable objectives set were around aspects of how to improve the customer experience, both from an internal and external perspective, then broken out into measurable tasks,” Hinton said. “Those involved in those tasks met weekly to review progress of objectives and tasks for six months, with me at the helm, guiding the discussions.”
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The results? They achieved a 92% completion rate with a lot of internal and external improvements felt. At the six-month mark, executives decided to continue the rally cry but also review and revise existing objectives to fit with the next six months worth of initiatives.
“In addition to this, when their customer journey was being built under my leadership, a cross-departmental team was formed to ensure input from all departments was provided,” Hinton said. “This all-inclusive approach allowed for a better understanding of how every person in the company touches the customer in some way.”
Hinton’s Executive Sponsor program involves more than executives and sales. Her program, now in a consulting environment, has always been set up to include product, professional services, sales, CSMs, execs, marketing and other departments, where applicable, to ensure that the customer is getting the “white glove” treatment they expect from this program.
“This means weekly meetings to review progress of the customer accounts included, the internal goals we have set, as well as ensuring we are providing the best support possible with the investment the customer has already made,” Hinton said.
Related Article: Courting Your Customers: Executive Sponsorship Is a Partnership
It Won’t Be Easy: Challenges in Cross-Departmental Collaboration on CX
What are the common challenges in getting various departments to collaborate on CX, and how can these be overcome?
The worst culprit is almost always conflicting departmental objectives, according to Dasteel.
“The second most significant factor is a very simple one: everyone is busy, just trying to get through the day, addressing generally very tactical things, one issue at a time,” Dasteel added. “It can be difficult to get team members to back up a few feet and look at underlying conditions or look at the impact of what they are doing on other departments. You have to forcibly — in the nicest possible way — encourage people to do that systematically.
Resistance to change is another common hurdle, according to Langley Henderson. She speculates it could be a bigger problem in traditionally “blue collar” industries, like waste and recycling. “But,” she added, “I’ve found that mid-level managers are often the most reluctant to adapt to new processes or tasks if they perceive them as burdensome or disruptive to their established routines. On top of this, without clear directives and support from leadership, fostering management buy-in is extremely difficult.”
Hinton said many CX leaders are experiencing an extreme level of “do more with less,” which is causing people to be scattered in too many directions. As a result, they prioritize things in their own way.
“To me, this is more about management setting the tone and ensuring a systemized way of doing things,” Hinton said. “In addition, it’s a constant re-education of the importance of CX and how their role impacts that. I’ve found that the more I provide that education, the more things come back to center. Finally, executive support. The execs have to be on board with this and continue to drive an overarching goal of an overall better customer experience, not as a ‘we’re losing customers! Quick, do something!’ measure. This is where the rally cry is a huge help.”
