Managing the customer experience is often thought of as the domain of those parts of the business that deliver the experience. Those with the greatest intimacy or connection with customers on a day-to-day basis. And while each group – marketing, sales, and support – does it’s best to serve the customers it interacts with, each is often unaware of the ways customers interact with other groups.
This is at the heart of a “disconnected customer experience.” And it happens because most businesses of scale are complex, and each of these functions operates in their own silo, approaching the customer experience problem from the perspective of their own domain.
Yet from the customer’s perspective, it’s not about the quality of the experience at any one stage of the lifecycle – though a poor experience at any stage is likely to cause defection – it’s about the quality, connectedness and seamlessness of the experience across the entire lifecycle, and all channels.
This is why one of the first steps to drive an organization-wide view of the customer is understanding what each functional group is doing now, and how that can be a barrier to a holistic view of the customer.
The end result of this logical, functional orientation to customer experience is that leaders in these organizations can have a hard time seeing across the business, and their natural bias can create challenges when they attempt to do so. Ironically, a major business unit not described above – IT – has the greatest potential to see the cross-org experience. Yet they are the least connected to the actual customer, and typically have little or no view into the customer’s experience.
The bottom line is that getting an end-to-end, “outside-in” view of the customer experience across all stages of interaction and across all functional organizations in your business is a critical step to delivering a better end-to-end customer experience. Some of the more common ways to do so include things like Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) programs and Customer Journey Mapping – both key elements of any successful customer experience management program.
Because what these programs share – and what customer experience leaders know – is that bringing the customer perspective to bear and widely sharing it across the organization is one of the most critical steps in improving customer experience. That’s because when it comes to customer experience, whatever the customer believes to be true is true. It’s up to you to understand what those beliefs are – and work across your organization to identify, share and close the cross-journey gaps they point you to.