It goes without saying that a positive customer experience is critical to a company’s success. Customers are king, and they have the power to vote with their money – and their feet. It’s crucial that the experience matches the demands and expectations of the customers. Customers nowadays want an experience that is straightforward, painless, seamless, personalized, convenient, and quick.
Everyone in the organization should be open and able to work together to deliver the experience in order to meet the expectations of the customers. Conversations, information, and data, in particular, should move easily across teams and departments. Within and across the organization, cross-functional collaboration is well-established, supported, and promoted. That, however, does not happen by itself.
Unfortunately, firms are often siloed, with data, information, and knowledge exchange limited to an employee’s own team, if at all. Collaboration is a difficult task. For customers, this means a fragmented and unpleasant experience.
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To break down silos, ensuring collaboration is “the way things are done around here,” and ensuring customers have a uniform experience across the brand, three following essential pillars should be in place.
Customer-focused culture
Businesses create and/or allow the culture they want. The move to a customer-centric culture can only occur if the CEO is dedicated to intentionally building it that way. In a customer-centric culture, no talks, decisions, or designs are made without first involving the customer’s voice and asking, “How will this influence the customer? What kind of value will it provide to the customer? What benefit would this have for the customer? The CEO and other top leaders should establish values, model behaviors, and reinforce behaviors and actions that address the answers to those issues.
This is significant because silos are connected or non-existent in a customer-centric culture. A customer-centric culture is, by definition, a collaborative culture. The entire organization rallies around the customer by definition. By definition, the entire organization should collaborate toward a common goal: providing a consistent and seamless customer experience. In a disjointed organization, this is impossible. This is only possible if everyone collaborates.
Governance
Businesses should ensure that employees understand their roles and responsibilities in designing and delivering a great experience as part of their customer experience strategy. Outlining program governance can help staff navigate this job and ensure that they understand how to collaborate rather than work in silos. As staff labor to offer the experience consumers want, governance comprises the structures and processes that are designed to assure responsibility, transparency, responsiveness, involvement, and more.
Governance committees serve to bridge the gap and break down or connect the silos between teams by being cross-functional and ensuring that data-driven action plans are implemented and outcomes are measured in a consistent and collaborative manner across the business. These committees get individuals talking, sharing data, and driving change, ensuring that customers have a consistent and frictionless experience throughout their interactions.
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Collaboration aided by technology
At the same time, technology should support and enable a collaborative workplace by allowing employees to share feedback, data, learnings, information, and more across departments, channels, and business units, among other things.
Let’s assume that enterprises are receiving feedback on their self-service channel. Customers are looking for support with a specific product issue, according to the comments. In order to fix the issue, update the self-service information, prepare the contact center for an increase in calls, and get messages out to customers apologizing for the issue and letting them know what’s being done, when, how, and so on, the CX team should share feedback with impacted teams in real-time.
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