Silo-Smashing Saves Money for Customer-Centric Organizations

Every touchpoint a customer has during their journey should be consistent and feel like part of a seamless whole. Systematically working to deliver the right customer experience at every touchpoint is the essence of CXM.

Another way to define customer experience is the impression left on your customers, i.e., how they feel and think about your organization or brand at all stages of their journey. Every touchpoint contributes to the customer experience, and these can occur in various parts of the organization. Thus, CX work involves a lot of continuous organizational change.

Building a customer-centric organization often requires a significant shift in how the company thinks and acts. CXM isn’t just about delivering good customer service or improving the user experience on digital platforms; it often involves major changes in decision-making processes and culture.

Six Common Strategic Challenges in CX

A hallmark of a customer-centric organization is making decisions based on customer insights, focusing on meeting customers’ needs and wishes. However, many organizations face strategic challenges such as:

Short-term focus. Working on the customer experience takes time, and you might even need to fail a few times to get it right. The time and resources required depend on the scope of changes needed, but it’s common to give up when results don’t appear as quickly as desired.

Low willingness to invest. Many organizations view CX work as a cost and a necessary evil. There can be a reluctance to invest in CX without a very clear return on investment, which can be hard to demonstrate directly.

Choosing which metrics to measure and follow up. Some organizations place too much faith in metrics, following too many, which makes it hard for employees to get an overview. But it can also be that the organization follows the wrong metrics, or that data for these metrics is collected incorrectly.

Lack of a declared strategy for the customer experience to be delivered. More and more organizations recognize the value of a declared CX strategy. This strategy should align with the overall business strategy and goals and be known and actionable by the departments delivering the customer experience (usually, all departments in an organization).

Unclear mandates. It’s important to clarify ownership of all touchpoints in the customer journey to ensure all parts of the organization are aligned toward the same goals.

Organizational silos. Silos occur when different departments or teams within an organization work in isolation from each other, lacking collaboration or communication. Silo mentality can lead to inefficiency, poor coordination, overlapping work, poor communication, and failed projects. There’s no room for silo thinking in CX work, as the key is to collaborate across organizational boundaries. Customers don’t care about internal organization but expect the same experience regardless of which channel or person they interact with.

Breaking down silos, for example, by promoting a better culture of collaboration and information sharing between departments, can lead to cost savings. When information and knowledge flow freely between departments, it becomes easier to solve problems and optimize processes, which can reduce unnecessary costs.

A key to reducing barriers between departments is clarifying ownership of all touchpoints in the customer journey. One purpose of working with customer journey maps is to create a shared internal understanding of the customer’s reality to facilitate work on a holistic experience that involves multiple parts of the organization. A clear customer journey map makes it easier to address poor customer experiences that require collaboration between departments and enables collaboration toward common goals with a clear vision.

Four Creative Ways to Get Management on Board:

To overcome these challenges, it’s necessary to involve management effectively. When organizations undergo changes, it’s often easy to identify managers and employees who are reluctant to change – they obstruct, criticize, and are simply difficult to manage. A major challenge arises when resistance comes from management, as having management on board is a critical success factor in change work. One of the biggest mistakes in CX work is starting the journey without involving corporate management. Without management’s support, you might need to request their time and resources, so it’s crucial to get management to drive CX change and act as role models. Here are some concrete tips to help achieve this:

CX Elevator Pitch. An elevator pitch is a useful tool for summarizing messages in a short and compelling way. To create a compelling elevator pitch, focus on the key message and develop a summary tailored to leaders’ interests and needs.

Elevator Pitches – Two Examples:

It’s significantly cheaper to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. By investing in the customer experience, we can reduce costs for customer service and complaints while increasing sales through satisfied, returning customers.

By focusing on the customer experience, we can differentiate ourselves from our competitors and create a positively charged brand that will make us more attractive to potential customers.

Ask managers to “walk in the customer’s shoes.” To increase understanding of the current customer experience, management can be invited to go on a journey where they experience what the customer goes through. The idea is to let them see the friction and problems customers face, which gives them insight into how their decisions and actions affect CX work. This can raise awareness of the importance of investing in CX and making improvements within the organization.

Invite management to participate in CX workshops. To engage management in CX, they can be invited to workshops with other participants, where the purpose might be to map the customer journey or create a persona.

Use Storytelling. Tell compelling stories about customers’ experiences and how changes in CX have made a real difference in their lives. Management can relate better to stories than to dry numbers and graphs.

In conclusion, as we strive to shape a customer-centric organization, CX leaders face a range of challenges. It’s not uncommon for them to struggle to get their issues and initiatives the attention they deserve in the boardroom. It’s paradoxical that the customer’s voice is often weak in many organizations, despite being central to our work.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that creating value for the customer is the primary reason organizations exist. Organizations are born from the need to meet customers’ desires, solve their problems, and deliver products or services that improve their lives. This fundamental purpose is often forgotten in the complex world of business strategies and financial goals.

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Helén Rigamonti has more than 25 years of experience as an executive manager. She has led several major projects aimed at improving CX in various organizations, including B2B, B2C, and non-profits. She combines her expertise in organizational development with her current roles as an author, interim manager, educator, and speaker to enhance customer experience and lead customer-centric change. Helén is part of the management team and a course leader in several educational programs for customer experience management, including at IHM Business School. She is also the Swedish ambassador and a member of the management team of the European Customer Experience organization. Her latest book on CX is “Customer Experience Management på svenska - konsten att leverera rätt kundupplevelse” (Customer Experience Management in Swedish - The Art of Delivering the Right Customer Experience).

Visit her website at rigamonti.se, or linkedin