Too often, the customer experience is viewed as the sole responsibility of the marketing or customer success teams. But the truth is, delivering an exceptional customer experience is a team effort. Every single department in your organization plays a role in shaping the way customers perceive your brand.
That's why it's so important to get buy-in from every level of the organization when you're trying to implement change or improve the customer experience.
It is now established that emphasizing the customer experience affects business achievements. Even though many businesses today claim to put the customer experience first and have a "customer first" objective, brands still fail to live up to consumers' expectations.
When something isn't going well, it's simple to find someone to blame. CX is developed via several customer journey touchpoints. And even while no one is entirely at fault, it is frequently advisable for everyone to consider how they might share culpability for solving the issue.
What is each team's role in fostering better CX, and how can every team cooperate to do so? More incredible teamwork enables your business to finish more ambitious initiatives effectively and create exceptional CX across all touchpoints.
Organizations must prioritize a positive customer experience, being strategic, value-adding partners with their customers, and quickly resolving any issues that hurt the consumer to remain competitive.
CX: Issues and Impact
CX ownership
Customers suffer as teams within corporations continue to delegate responsibility to CX. When teams waste time arguing over who is responsible instead of owning up to their mistakes and taking action to remedy the issue, everyone loses.
If we first lay a successful foundation for customer-centric CX, then we can begin to uncover other challenges brands face, such as a lack of insight on customers, disconnected and missing customer data, poor cross-functional collaboration, disparate or incorrect recognition of customers and their needs and expectations," says Augie Ray, Vice President, Gartner.
Lost Priorities
There may be a problem with priorities, or more likely, there is disagreement around what CX actually means. Delivering pertinent material to the appropriate audience in the proper time is how marketers frequently define strong CX, and click-throughs and conversion rates serve as indicators of success. When a deal is closed, and the customer is satisfied with the terms and the process, a strong customer experience is evident in sales.
For product teams, CX depends on developing and delivering cutting-edge products with features that amaze users and make competing products appear inferior. Good CX also refers to a fruitful and cordial dialogue that aids customers in solving an issue and encourages repeat business for the service and support personnel.
And Brands Bear the Brunt
Customers, however, need to distinguish between them. When a consumer has a negative experience at any stage of the buying process, they hold the brand—not the marketers, product managers, or customer service representatives—to blame. They post a negative review about the product or service on Facebook or Google and promise never to use it again.
They may criticize some unsightly conduct by call center employees or a pushy salesperson, but the brand pays the price in the end. A 1-star review will result in poorer rankings, a tarnished online reputation, and a loss of influence over the consumer's purchasing choice.
Responsibility Needs Awareness
So why don't businesses approach CX as a team effort? One explanation would be the scarcity of valuable insights into the vast amounts of data flowing from an increasing number of feedback sources. Brands don't need to collect pertinent data and insights, according to 12.4% of CX specialists.
A firm could perform well in one area but fall short in another without even realizing it. And that may result in resources being misallocated to the incorrect issues, never addressing the genuine problem.
6-Step Guide to Introduce a Collaborative CX Focus
Your company will be better positioned to provide excellent CX across all areas by fostering collaboration and building solid teams. Put your energy into forming a varied culture, be motivated to learn, and be furnished with the necessary resources. Here are six steps to implement CX emphasis in your firm.
Step 1: Recognize Silos
According to 11.5% of CX experts, one of the main concerns for customer experience is organizational silos. Assessing the organizational structure and determining where silos exist and where competing agendas amongst departments may be negatively influencing CX are the first steps in fostering collaboration and uniting teams around the customer experience. While it seems easy, this procedure can be challenging, especially for large, international businesses with established traditions.
Step 2: Create Balanced Teams
Analyze the strengths and shortcomings of your staff. Who has excellent logical reasoning skills but has trouble generating radical innovations? Do you have a creative employee who fails to execute projects on time? Each team member contributes something unique to the group. Establish balanced teams with members who each have strengths and shortcomings that the other team members don't.
Step 3: Craft Cross-Departmental Processes
Data and systems are the most effective means of bringing teams together. The elimination of common sources of conflict, such as the sales and marketing teams using different customer information, occurs when all teams use a single source of truth or the same customer data/analytics. This enables teams to make quick, collaborative decisions on important CX priorities.
Setting broad objectives is considerably more straightforward if you and your coworkers are conversant in one another's language and can learn from one another. Your company's CX message needs to be understood by your marketing, content, design, and sales teams, who must all know how to communicate it.
Step 4: Start From the Top
Customer-first culture starts at the organization's top, which is vital in developing a mindset focused on the customer's needs. Everyone needs to be aware of how important the customer experience is, from the CEO down to the creative, digital, and customer support teams. If all employees treat CX as their job, it will quickly improve. Leadership is frequently the first source of tolerance for CX issues that still need to be resolved.
Moreover, encourage a sense of belonging. A team's sense of community fosters a feeling of belonging. Insist that you all want to accomplish a goal together, whether as a team leader or a team member. This can take the form of a daily check-in meeting, treating the team to lunch to boost mood, or engaging in a few icebreaker activities with new team members.
Step 5: Get the Right Tools
If you don't need the correct tools, it's easier to work as a team. For a team to function effectively, collaborative technology is required. Included is a method of sharing data and documents, such as through a cloud-based service like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Box. To execute tasks on time and communicate project progress, your team will also require day-to-day project management. Having a central location to chat all day long is therefore applicable. Team chat tools like Google Hangouts, Slack, and Glip are excellent examples.
Step 6: Gauge Progress
Once a company has made CX a top priority, the next stage is to mobilize resources to achieve CX objectives, then monitor progress. Making an executive in charge of CX measurement will provide them the authority to promote CX objectives, streamline procedures, and remove roadblocks to success.
If executives need help persuading some departments to support an organization-wide CX focus, they could remind their colleagues that this approach has boosted revenue, repeat business, and customer retention. In other words, over time, everyone wins.
How to Approach CX as a Team Effort?
Businesses must be impartial about what is and isn't working while striving to enhance the consumer experience. The user experience team could try to repair the problem while the analytics team investigates the cause of the problem. Prioritization and collaboration can happen quickly, and this will improve the customer experience.
Utilize Customer Insights as a Handbook
Business executives can lose focus on important CX issues because of their passion for their product or service. Utilizing customer data is crucial to enhancing digital customer experiences, which comprise millions of online interactions, to assist prevent this.
All teams must clearly grasp what is "good" or "poor" about their CX to continuously improve the digital customer journey. User experience, product management, engineering, IT/DevOps, e-commerce, analytics/insights, marketing, and customer support need to interact with the same customer data to maximize collaboration.
The correct tools can improve cross-departmental communication by analyzing all consumer data from digital platforms to find abnormalities and technical faults. These tools can notify teams of problems causing customers to abandon their carts, click angry buttons, or submit more customer support tickets. Teams can then collaborate to decide in what order to resolve issues after they have been highlighted.
Develop a Holistic Attitude
Customers' experiences span channels in our developing digital world, including websites, mobile apps, social media, and physical businesses. Businesses must approach customer experience (CX) holistically, providing a cohesive experience that accurately represents their businesses.
Customers want consistency. Therefore experiences shouldn't stay the same depending on where they make the purchase. Each channel must communicate with the others, which requires deliberate and persistent teamwork. When several departments and stakeholders are involved in decision-making, A/B testing cross-functional projects before implementing significant changes (such as price) can help.
It's essential to approach the measuring of CX success holistically. Analyses of the digital experience, comments from customer service, qualitative studies of in-person interactions, and VoC calls must all be considered.
What Can Your Business Gain With CX-Focused Collaborative Effort?
What precisely will your organization get from successful teamwork? The level of collaboration increases throughout the organization as organizations dismantle silos and unite teams around the customer experience. Teams work more productively and effectively together, which enhances CX. Collaboration and a focus on CX feed off one another, producing outstanding business results.
Growth Beyond Your CX Goals
You need the appropriate resources to work toward a CX goal. No instrument is more effective than a successful team. You can accomplish much more with a dedicated team than you could alone. You can achieve your CX objectives with everyone on the team working hard.
Efficient Operations
Your teams will learn how to communicate more successfully when they work together toward your CX goal. This makes your company run more smoothly and prevents communication breakdowns. You might urge your staff to enroll in relevant training and skill-development programs to improve their communication abilities.
Motivated Workforce
Team members must also be valued to value teamwork for CX. Make it clear to your team members and coworkers that their opinions of your CX initiatives matter. Your team will be more inclined to go above and above if they feel appreciated and valuable.
One Unanimous Voice
Better quality assurance will be present in your customer interactions when your teams effectively interact with one another across all departments. Employees can appraise each other's skills and weaknesses and offer suggestions to one another. No matter whatever department the customer interacts with, this enables your business to have more consistent customer interactions and create exceptional CX.
The Key Takeaways
Whoever is in charge of CX is irrelevant to the customer; what counts is whether everyone in the company is committed to providing excellent CX and does their bit to achieve it. But it's only possible to know how to do that with knowledge of how consumers are interacting with and experiencing the brand across many touchpoints.
Every person in your company should consider customer experience to be a top priority. For an organization and everyone inside it to be successful, there must be a unified CX front. It needs to permeate every division of your business. Consistency across departments strengthens your brand and enhances customer experience. Remember that if you don't concentrate on creating a good CX in this intensely competitive industry, you can lose your consumers to a competitor.
Read More: How Can Good Employee Experiences Deliver Great Customer Experiences?