Editorial
The Gist
- Collaborative approach to CX. Democratizing customer centricity fosters collaboration across departments, ensuring all teams contribute to a cohesive customer experience.
- Data-driven insights. Encouraging shared customer insights among teams helps organizations leverage valuable data and improve decision-making.
- Breaking down silos. Eliminating silos within organizations enhances communication and allows for a more holistic understanding of customer interactions.
It’s become a cliché to say that customer experience (CX) isn’t the sole responsibility of any one team, or that every part of the business should have a role to play in CX.
Of course they do. The interlocking nature of businesses today means that to deliver exceptional CX, each customer touchpoint needs to work in harmony, and no one department owns them all. For instance, an online retailer’s e-commerce team might own everything from the moment a customer lands on the site until the point at which they check out. But the mechanics of receiving their purchase will then fall into logistics, which also deals with any mistakes or changes to the order.
To deliver a great, cohesive experience, democratizing customer centricity is essential, as ecommerce and logistics teams need to be aligned around the same goal. This can be challenging, as each will have different key performance indicators and targets to hit.
This is just one example. The brands that get it right are those that align not just two or three functions but all of them.
The Importance of Democratizing Customer Centricity
How do companies start to make each function customer-focused? By democratizing customer centricity.
Most organizations will have multiple touchpoints with customers. Sales might be talking directly to prospects, marketing will communicate with them and customer support will follow up on product issues. These channels could include everything including calls, face-to-face interactions, chatbots, service tickets, emails and comments on social media.
These touchpoints will all add up to a significant amount of data. Yet how often will that data be fed back to teams tasked with coordinating CX or building customer-centric products and services? If it does happen, it’s done in an ad hoc, unstructured way, which relies on the person with the data deciding whether it’s worth sharing. This means potentially valuable insights could be missed.
Related Article: Is Your Business Really Customer-Centric?
Breaking Down Silos Between Research and the Rest of the Business
Part of the reason that data is not used to its fullest potential is siloed thinking around who is responsible for researching and advocating for the customer experience.
Traditionally, this has been done by researchers, many with academic backgrounds in different kinds of research methods. Rigorous, valuable research requires technical skills, experience and the ability to conduct ethical research and produce accurate, useful outputs.
Yet there is a danger that, as with any specialist function, research can be too closed off and only conducted in certain ways. We see this often. Businesses invest heavily in research yet keep it separate from other parts of the company.
For example, research as a process occurs on one side and design on the other. That’s not to say research isn’t shared with design teams, but it might be done in a way that works for the research teams but doesn’t necessarily fit in with the workflow of the design team (or other parts of the business).
This could also limit the insights and trends that research teams identify, causing them to miss the value that lies in the interactions non-researchers are having.
Enabling Customer Centricity in Your Organization
What if companies were to look at the salespeople talking to customers and start thinking about how it could catalyze them to share what prospects are asking for? Or is there a way product designers can become more embedded in customer thinking when they’re making roadmap or design decisions?
This is democratizing customer centricity.
It’s not about getting everyone to do something that highly skilled experts usually do in the hopes of saving some money. Skilled researchers are still very much required, but rather than being the only ones who can dive into what customers want and need, they can help support other parts of the business to get closer to the end user.
Many different people in the business are already talking to customers and getting valuable customer feedback. This is gold. And we have an opportunity to make the most of this customer wisdom across the board.
Fostering a Customer-Centric Culture Across Teams
How do we enable this? There are certainly tools that can help make it easier to share insights and allow non-researchers to take those first steps, but first, there has to be a cultural shift. Simply saying that the whole organization wants to be customer-centric isn’t enough. There needs to be a companywide understanding of what that means, how people contribute toward this, where changes to processes need to be made and why this all matters.
Creating Programs to Share Customer Insights
Can a program be set up to allow product managers to sit in on customer interviews, or do sales reps have a regular debrief session with researchers on what they’ve learned?
Another option would be to run a monthly customer showcase where teams sit together and hear customers talk about what they struggle with and strive for.
What other initiatives are you running that could be tweaked? For instance, if you’ve set up a mentoring program, could mentees from non-customer-facing roles be matched with mentors who regularly speak to users? What if the leadership team always heard directly from the customer on relevant feedback to the business decision at hand? How might we help everyone be better storytellers and rally others around customer stories?
Related Article: Customer Whisperers: What CMOs Know About Being Customer-Centric
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Adjusting Collective Mindsets
Democratizing customer centricity is very rarely achieved through a complete revolution in culture, people and technology. It’s really about adjusting collective mindsets so that everyone truly understands that being customer-focused is not just the responsibility of one or two teams but the entire organization.
Many organizations already have the capabilities in place, with excellent researchers doing great work. What’s needed is a commitment to breaking down silos so that people can get closer to customers, and those valuable insights reach everyone, not just a select few.
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