In June this year, Paul Sands from Customer Bullseye published an article called Chief Customer Officers: Some Group Therapy, Some Golden Nuggets. In the article, he detailed the pains, challenges and frustrations that 50+ Chief Customer Officers faced on a daily basis. The findings were enlightening. So we’ve explored a few of these nuggets in more detail, adding in our own thoughts and experiences.

Interdepartmental responsibility is a big issue for big businesses. When there’s lots of departments involved, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of passing the buck when there’s a customer issue. Or, you might have a situation where departments are doing their own customer initiatives, and are unwilling to coordinate with pre-existing plans and roadmaps. This happened a lot when digital was first launched. Unfortunately, this lack of collaboration takes its toll, on both the customer and the business.

As Sands highlights, the solution is to create shared ownership around a unified vision for the customer experience across departmental silos.

What you can do:

• Involve customers in vision-setting working
  In addition to engaging colleagues in vision-setting workshops, aim to get some real customers in the room too.

Why? It prevents disagreements about what people think customers want and need. Instead everyone can hear directly from the customers themselves. Which means you can create a vision based on real needs.

• Make sure everyone is clear about their role
  When shaping the customer experience vision, make sure it’s very easy for everyone to see “their place” in delivering it. Show each department why their specific role is an important piece of the jigsaw. This needs quite a lot of thinking and visualisation – but it’s worth the effort.

Why? Success depends on everyone pulling together. And you’ll get much better buy in across departments once everyone understands their value and the part they have to play.

• Recognise current successes
  Publicly recognise the positive things departments and people are already doing. Highlight how they are already playing a crucial part in delivering current successes in customer experience. Let them know that you are aware of and value the benefits of their hard work. And show how you’re building on existing capabilities (if possible) within the vision.

Why? Showing people they are appreciated leads to a happier workforce that will be more emotionally invested in your new vision.

• Adopt a service design approach
  Service design encapsulates both “front of house” (customer-facing) and “back of house” (business operational) perspectives. It’s the best way to capture and visualise a seamless, practical, actionable vision to define customer experience.

Why? A service design approach promotes a shared understanding and vision by aligning departments and helping you engage the entire business.

This is just the first part in our three-part series. Look out for the rest of the articles.

Other articles in the series:

Part 2 – How to manage diverse departments
Part 3 – But who is my customer?

Find out more:

Discover the power of service design to find out more

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