Building Relationships Across Departments for Customer Experience Success

Relationships between customers and brands are the foundation of customer experience (CX) success. To ensure that customer experience is successful, companies must focus on creating strong relationships- by understanding customer needs and providing exceptional service.

So how do you ensure that all your customer experience (CX) initiatives are successful? In this article, Here are some practical tips to ensure that your CX initiatives successfully build strong relationships with customers.

Avoid Siloed Working

“The experience that a customer has with any organization is ultimately delivered by everyone in that organization,” shares certified CX Consultant Ian Golding. This means that everyone in the company is a critical component of customer experience, whether they work in support, sales, marketing, or any other department.

Siloed working negatively impacts both customers and employees, leading to the following:

• Higher operational costs
• Negative brand reputation
• Bad customer experience
• High acquisition costs
• High churn rates

It’s essential to avoid silos and ensure that all departments are working together cohesively and have a clear understanding of the overall customer journey. By breaking down silos, companies can understand what customers are going through and make sure their experience is consistent across channels.

Revisit Organizational Culture

Gaps in organizational culture often regrettably stem from a less-than-ideal leadership style. Some leaders can single-mindedly focus on numbers and goals, overlooking the essential role of customer experience in business success.

Employees are stretched thin, especially post-pandemic layoffs that left most teams lean. As such, most departments are pressured to meet goal after goal, often leaving CX as a mere afterthought.

Leaders should look at the big picture and recognize that customer experience is a priority rather than an afterthought. Leadership needs to focus on building an organizational culture where customer-centricity is at its core.

As such, leaders should emphasize the importance of providing exceptional service by investing in team training, creating a positive work environment, and empowering employees to make decisions that are best for customers.

Make Customer-centricity Everyone’s Responsibility

This is a common question that CX consultants always encounter: Who owns CX? Does the responsibility fall with sales, customer support, marketing, or another team?

The answer is simple: Everyone. Customer experience should be owned by everyone in the organization, from top to bottom. It’s not just a marketing or support issue – it’s something that every single team needs to focus on.

Ultimately, everyone is responsible for the customer experience. At the end of the day, no one team or person (even the CEO) can take charge of a customer’s end-to-end experience. 

It’s not just about having a CX department or a CX manager, too—it’s about empowering other departments to understand customer needs and ensure that their actions reflect customer-centricity.

Assess the Current CX Landscape and Address Key Issues

We often get so caught up behind the scenes that we forget to look closely at how things are for our customers. So if you feel your customer experience initiatives are not working, maybe it’s time to take a step back and assess the current CX landscape.

First, you need to identify any critical issues impacting your customer experience. This could include anything- from long wait times for support inquiries to confusing navigation on your website.

Encouraging collaboration and feedback between teams is also crucial at this stage so that everyone can provide their insights and ensure that the customer experience is tailored to customers’ needs.

From there, you can create an actionable plan that addresses these key issues and helps ensure that your CX initiatives are achievable and are making a difference. To help you keep track of everything, you might want to make use of a customer experience audit checklist.

Leverage Data and Analytics to Inform Your CX Strategy

Data and analytics should be leveraged to inform your CX strategy and ensure you are making data-driven decisions. Having access to customer insights can help you understand how customers interact with your brand, as well as any areas for improvement in the customer journey.

You can use these insights to create personalized experiences and stay ahead of the curve to anticipate customer needs and offer tailored experiences. 

By combining data with customer feedback, companies can more effectively identify opportunities for improvement in their CX initiatives and create a better experience for customers.

CX leaders may often encounter other leaders or teams that distrust data or do not see its value, especially if the insights run counter to what they’re used to. In such instances, it might be helpful to highlight that these insights are not based on emotion, insight, or conjecture—they’re based on facts.

It’s also essential to make sure that data is accessible and understandable for everyone in the organization so that they can use it to inform the decisions they make. Ultimately, demonstrating how data helps teams provide better customer experiences can help build trust in its value and encourage more collaboration across departments on CX initiatives.

Here’s a pro tip for CX professionals: Keep a library of resources (articles, studies, blogs, journals, etc.) that support the data-based insights that you have so that they can be readily accessed when needed. This can also help others get a better understanding of how data can be used to improve customer experience.

Conclusion

Creating an exceptional customer experience can be challenging, but it can be successfully done with the right strategies and leadership in place. By breaking down silos and revisiting organizational culture, companies can ensure that everyone works together to provide the best possible CX. 

Additionally, by assessing your current CX landscape and leveraging data and analytics, you can create a strategy that is tailored to customer needs. It may take some time to get the ball rolling, but the effort will be worth it when customers are happier and more loyal to your brand.