CX Is a Team Sport

Watching the March Madness tournaments this past weekend, you must admire the teamwork and discipline it takes to win a game in this tournament, let alone win six games and walk away as national champions! But it also makes me think about how delivering an effective customer experience is also a team sport, requiring that same level of teamwork and discipline.

I think of customer experience as lying at the intersection of People, Process, Technology, and Communications. And if you accept that, it means that HR (people), Operations (process), IT (technology), and Marketing and Sales (communications) must be working together to deliver a great customer experience.

Marketing and Sales set the customer expectation with how they communicate about your products and services and how they sell them; Operations has to deliver against the expectations that have been set; IT has to provide employees and customers the digital tools (websites, apps, databases, etc.) to enable the experience; HR has to hire and train the right people and put them in a position to deliver the expected customer experience; and Pricing or Revenue Management has to price the product or service correctly so that the customer’s perception of value is favorable for the price paid.

And also important to the team’s success is the vital role that Product Development and Management play in designing the products and that Customer Service plays in being both the safety net for all of this as well as serving as the knowledge center in cases where that customer journey may break down.

The challenge with being a customer experience leader is that to be successful, you are working horizontally, or counter to how most businesses are organized. Nearly all companies are organized along functional lines: Marketing, Sales, Operations, Pricing/Revenue Management, IT, HR, Finance, Customer Service, etc. But delivering a great customer experience means getting all those functions to work in concert with each other, like a basketball team, to ensure hand-offs are clean and that nothing falls between the silos.

What I have found to be most successful is having the right governance model in place to get the team organized, sharing visibility to all knowledge about customer needs and expectations, getting alignment and coordination on actions to take to improve the experience, and sharing accountability. One of the best tips I can share from my own experience is to get each of the key stakeholders discussed earlier, plus the owners of each key customer touchpoint – head of digital, regional operators, and head of customer care – together monthly to agree on a fact base, sponsor and charter improvement teams, and steer and guide those teams to successful completion of experience improvement projects.

So regardless of where your brackets stand and which teams you are still rooting for in the March Madness tournaments, take your cues from the most successful and talented teams. Make sure you have your CX team organized and aligned properly with all of the functions in your organization to deliver a great customer experience in order to drive your company’s future growth.

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