Tired Of The CX Disconnect Between Departments? Try This!

The silo mentality perpetuates in many organizations, meaning Marketing does what they do while Sales does what they do, and never the twain shall meet. However, the Customer Experience is not siloed. Every interaction a customer has with an organization—from the Website to the Sales Representative to Customer Service to Accounting—is all one experience to the customer. 

Unfortunately, when there are organizational silos, customers get a different experience when they touch different parts of the organization.

We discussed the problem with silos and how to overcome them for your Customer Experience in a recent podcast. The best way to break down silos is by establishing what we call a Customer Experience Council.

What one part of the organization does can affect another part of the organization. When each part of the organization optimizes their performance for different goals, it can cause problems elsewhere in other department’s goals. 

So, for example, Sales is doing the best they can to bring in customers. However, if Sales is promising too much to get the sale, they are not aligned with the interests of other parts of the organization, like Fulfillment.  When customers are disappointed that the product or service wasn’t everything Sales told them it would be, it deteriorates the overall Customer Experience. Plus, Fulfillment has to deal with all the backlash. 

Your Culture Dictates Your Customer Experience

Your Customer Experience is the way it is because of the culture you have. Your organization has beliefs, systems, values, and ethics that affect how your people work with one another and customers. These factors make up your culture.

When your culture puts the organization first, then your people will, too. It can lead to experiences that leave customers feeling disappointed and frustrated. 

However, when your culture puts customers first, then your people follow suit. In our Global Customer Experience consultancy, we believe that companies that achieve a customer-first culture are the ones that foster the most customer loyalty and retention. 

We have a model called Na?ve to Natural that we use to help organizations see where their culture is today in nine different areas of their business. These include:

In our global Customer Experience consultancy, we analyze each of these areas and then assign them a level of customer-centricity. The least customer-focused organizations are Na?ve, and the most are Natural. The purpose of the model is to draw attention to where you are today, so you see what you have to change to get where you want to be. 

Once you know where you want to go, you need a team to get you there. To affect real change to the culture, you need a group of individuals from all across the organization to collaborate. 

The idea for this team occurred to me when I was running Customer Experience for British Telecom years ago. My program was cutting across all these different silos. Everybody was doing different things. Moreover, each department had different goals. Marketing had one set of measures and did what they needed to do while Sales had different ones, and so on.  As a result, every department had a different way of doing things. 

I realized that I needed to pull everybody together around the table to achieve this common goal.  We needed what we now call a Customer Experience Council. 

So, How Does a Customer Experience Council Work?

Customer Experience Councils work together to improve the Customer Experience.  They define what drives value for the company and how to create value for customers.  By identifying what the company wants as a common goal together, each department can see how their department’s actions contribute to that Customer Experience goal. Perhaps most importantly, the Council can align the efforts to work together to get there.  

Ideally, the leader of the council is the Chief Customer Officer or the person that's been charged with improving the Customer Experience. Furthermore, this person should be outside the departments gathered, meaning they are independent of Marketing, Sales, Accounting, and the like so that they can be impartial.  

Here is an example of how the Council would work: 

• The Council chooses a department to start a conversation about how to improve the Customer Experience; let’s say it is Customer Service.
• Customer Service tells the Council they are flooded with calls from unhappy customers because sales teams are promising too much of the product or service. 
• The Council asks Sales to explain. 
• Sales defends their actions because the leads they get from Marketing are not qualified enough and so they promise the moon and stars to get the sale.
• The Council turns to Marketing with a raised eyebrow. 
• Marketing explains what types of customers they are targeting and how they are doing it to hit their Lead Generation goal. 
• The Council has an Aha! Moment.

In this example, the Council sees that Marketing’s targeting efforts are broad. Marketing did it to attract the highest amount of leads.  Marketing hit their goals, but, as a result, the leads are less qualified, and Sales then pushes the boundaries to get the sale. Then, when the company doesn’t deliver what sales promised, Customer Service gets complaint calls. 

Now, the Council can get specific about how to solve the problem of the weak leads. Maybe they change the Marketing team’s goals for how many leads they produce. Perhaps they change the advertising to attract a different group that would be a better fit for the product. Maybe they decide to send Sales to training on how to qualify leads so they can focus on the leads they get that are the best fits for the product or service. 

Whatever direction they go, the Council will have everyone’s input and agreement on how to do better moving forward to improve the Customer Experience. Best of all, the Customer Service department could notice a drop in cranky customer calls.  

What Does The Customer Experience Council Do?

The purpose of the Customer Experience Council is to get people to talk and have one aligned goal, which is to improve the Customer Experience. In other words, key people from every department review the end-to-end experience together as a team.

There are multiple objectives of the Customer Experience Council. First, the Customer Experience Council must have a tactical approach at an operational level rather than a conceptual one, an Operational CX Council, as it were. Moreover, it should have robust authority to implement their tactics, communicate priorities, and identify any gaps or overlaps between departments. Most of all, they must ensure that everyone understands how their department’s actions affect the other departments and, ultimately, the overall experience the customer has. 

Furthermore, the point of the Operational CX Council is to be deliberate and goal-driven. The idea is that you walk in and say, “Okay, look, we've got evidence that our customers don't trust us and our customers don't feel valued or appreciated. How do we solve that problem?”  Being specific about the problem can garner excellent and focused creative insights, which is not always the case with broad, aspirational ideas.

However, if an organization also has the resources for a Strategic Customer Experience Council at a senior level, that would be ideal. The Strategic CX Council’s goal is to solve the more significant problems and make strategic decisions. Also, they would manage the tactics kicked up from the Operational CX Council’s team (Read: The Strategic CX Council approves Operational CX Council’s tactics, grants them authority, and allocates resources to the cause.)

Both councils should also be accountable for measuring their results. The “numbers” should be moving, whether that is a drop in irritated calls to the call center, an increase in Customer Loyalty, or an increase in the Net Promoter Score?. 

What is a Monthly Meeting Like?

The Operational CX Council should meet once a month. If there is a second Strategic CX Council, it should meet at least once a quarter, but it wouldn’t hurt for them to meet more often, too. 

Here is a Typical Agenda, what items should be discussed, and what the Objectives are for each item: 

• Review the actions agreed upon last time to get everyone on the same page  
• Share results of overall customer satisfaction measures in place to record progress and compare effectiveness in various areas
• Report from each department on their systems to improve the areas defined by the Customer Experience Council and review whether they remain aligned with the other departments
• Reveal best practices from specific departments to facilitate other departmental integration and further align the actions to the common goal
• Reexamine the agreed-upon current initiatives and programs sponsored by the Customer Experience Council
• Evaluate customer measures for the organization to ensure they are effective
• Prioritize and plan the next steps and future initiatives for improvement to the program
• Assess any new customer research undertaken by the organization to determine what adjustments to specific tactics might be necessary
• Statements of any other business (AOB) from council members to allow for adapting to changes in the market or industry
• Adjourn until next month’s meeting

By getting people together every month and having support and resources from the Strategic CX Council, the Customer Experience Council will focus their efforts and facilitate progress. Moreover, knowing you have to report in on something to everyone at a meeting and that the company is measuring the results holds the team accountable. In my experience, this situation can be quite compelling. 

What I know from personal experience and through doing this many times within companies, is that a Customer Experience Council system works. It provides focus and alignment. Perhaps most importantly, it’s inexpensive.  

A Customer Experience doesn’t have departments. To a customer, the whole thing is one complete experience and what every department does affects what they think of it. However, work has departments, and they all have their ways of doing their part. A Customer Experience Council will help you convince these departments to work together and put the pieces together to provide the Customer Experience you want as a whole. 

To hear more about the Key Rules for Establishing a CX Council in more detail, listen to the complete podcast here. 

If you want to benchmark your organization’s performance in the new world of behavioral economics against other companies, take our short questionnaire.  Once you submit, we compare your answers against what we know about the market and send you a free personalized report about where your organization is today. 

Hear the rest of the conversation on Key Rules for Establishing a CX Council on The Intuitive Customer Podcast. These informative podcasts are designed to expand on the psychological ideas behind understanding customer behavior. To listen in, please click here.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs and podcasts:

ANY PRESS IS GOOD PRESS, RIGHT?

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION IS DECLINING IN THE UK. IS THE US NEXT?

STEREOTYPES: THE HARD-WIRED WAY OUR BRAINS MAKE DECISIONS

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of six bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX