The Key to Better CX: Breaking Down Silos With Cross-Org Alignment and Accountability

Empower and motivate integrated, cross-org teams and experience-led behaviors

Humans like rules…when they apply to someone else. But sometimes they’re necessary; without them, even programs with the best of intentions can fall apart.

As it relates to customer experience, alignment, and accountability helps set those rules. Kind of like the lane bumpers that keep bowling balls from going into the gutter, it’s a framework through which you can align stakeholders and resources to prevent customer experience from being a siloed activity, helping inform and inspire employees across the business to work together to deliver better experiences. 

The “eat your vegetables and exercise regularly” mantra of customer centricity

The fact is, without a framework in place to guide and prioritize decision-making, it’s difficult—if not impossible—to drive meaningful and sustainable customer-centric change within a business.

Everyone in the organization—from executives and customer-facing to the back office—needs a way to consider the effect of their actions and to take steps to ensure the decisions they make enable the experiences your customers expect. 

At heart, the goal is to align people in the organization around ways of thinking and working that improve customer experience, while creating accountability across the organization for doing so. 

Leading customer-centric organizations focus on this because they recognize the importance and value of helping everyone understand their role and responsibilities, and of making sure a framework is in place for accountability.

What happens when everyone is pointed in the same direction? 

One of the most important things you can do to sustainably and consistently manage the design and delivery of great experiences—and reap the business benefits of doing so—is to get everyone pointed in the same direction. 

Key outcomes include:

• Alignment in the organization. With alignment, everyone in the organization understands what the goals are, the part they play in achieving those goals, and how their contributions fit into the bigger picture.
• A shared vision of the future experience. “What success looks like” must be unambiguous, including what people need to do differently to achieve that future regardless of role or span of responsibility.
• Accountability across the organization. With accountability, everyone knows what they’ll be measured against and why, and what they need to do to impact their goals.
• Collaborative, customer-centric ways of working. Knowing where you’re going and why makes it easier to more organically work across, and think outside of, traditional organizational silos in pursuit of common goals. 

How do you get everyone pointed in the same direction? 

The reality is that no one individual or group can do this work alone. In other words, it’s a team sport. And top performing teams—on sports fields and in business—require a structure to help them align on goals, be held accountable for their actions, and to define and prioritize those things which will and will not get done. 

“If experience really is everyone’s responsibility, then it’s no one’s responsibility—unless you have systems in place to combine accountability and engagement.” In the world of experience management, these “systems” are made up of people and teams who are responsible for focusing on and doing what’s right for customers, balanced with the value created for the organization.

Framing this in ways that all levels of the organization can understand, and ensuring that the right things are being focused on in the right order, requires centralized teams and decision-making support. And while customer-centric organizations approach the structure of these teams in slightly different ways, there are several common elements to governance and decision-making that we see repeated again and again.

They include:

Common Elements 

Avoid the “alignment and accountability paradox” 

When you have alignment without accountability, people agree on where you’re going and why, often getting excited and energized by the possibilities. But without any way to measure progress against action items, the sense of excitement and common purpose can quickly dissolve when it becomes clear that regular progress isn’t being made and your experience-related goals are more aspirational than real. 

When you have accountability without alignment, people know what they’re expected to do and how they’ll be measured, but they don’t necessarily understand or agree on why they’re doing those things. People need to be brought along, need to understand what’s in it for them (aka WIIFM), and buy-in to how they fit into the bigger picture.

But when you do get people aligned and create accountability across the organization, you get a high-performing organization where everyone knows where they’re going and why—and what they need to do to make that happen.

And they do it. 

Learn more about 360-Degree Alignment and Accountability—and about the other 7 keys in the Experience Operating System—in Michael Hinshaw and Diane Magers new book, Experience Rules! The Experience Operating System (XOS) and 8 Keys to Enable It.