CX can make or break your company… but your company can make or break CX, too!

Pop quiz: do you have a proper CX strategy in place?

Follow-up question: is the way you structured your teams and their way of working helping or hindering your CX strategy implementation?

Our educated guess, based on our work with clients of all sizes in varied industries, is that you’ll answer a combination of “yes, kind of” and “hmmm, probably not really always helping”. That may be a comfort to hear, but deep down you you know this is not really ideal and probably you’d love a clear way to change this around?

When it comes to customer experience, status quo is not ideal, as this is really the ball game nowadays. So let’s see how you can make a start to improve the way your organization supports your CX strategy!

What are ways you can start to improve CX adoption your company?

1. Assess the lay of the land; what happens inside your organization that boosts or blocks your CX initiatives? (hint: processes & mindsets are a big one here!)
2. Analyze your customer journeys (again): What is working well? What isn’t? Where are new opportunities or new roadblocks?
3. Analyze your objectives and reward systems: are they in contradiction within and/or between departments? Are there any conflicting objectives that require tweaking? 4
4. Get your CX strategy crystal clear: what is it about, what is the current state and what is your roadmap?
5. Look at where to place CX responsibilities: have you outgrown your current setup?
6. Build more cross-department and alignment: what is each department’s role? How can you implement activities that unite all departments around CX? The goal is to embed your CX vision more thoroughly into every colleague’s daily way of doing things.

The good news is: You can do all of this without needing to restructure or redesign your teams right away. You can start tomorrow!

The other news is: It will take your attention and, especially in the early phase, time and effort.

But we’ve found that in many companies, your colleagues are waiting for your help. Not because they want more work – and lack of time is one of the main culprits in botched CX initiatives – but because they, too, want to see barriers removed. They want to provide good service and brilliant experiences. But you need to pave the way for them to do so.

If you can only do one thing… focus on increasing cross-functional collaboration and alignment!

This is one of the golden rules in organization design: always speak to your stakeholders, and involve them in shaping your processes, governance and structure whenever relevant. Customers expect with brands across channels and touchpoints before and after their purchase, so you’ll need to cover many bases here, talking to many different people.

Sounds heavy? It doesn’t have to be. For instance, we often use our proven tools and techniques that we apply in our customer experience projects to algin teams and stakeholders.

How? Think about running your customer journey workshops together: Product Management, Marketing, Pricing, Legal, Supply Chain, Accounting, … in short, get a delegate from all the teams you need to resolve the barriers you’ve identified. What happens in such a workshop is so much more than getting the journey mapped. You will hear about their reasons for doing or not doing something, and they will start to understand their own role in the customer experience your brand strives for.

Want to do more? Look at where you place CX responsibilities inside your organization.

Where would you place your CX knowledge & people? Inside the Marketing team, or closer to Operations, or perhaps IT? Is it even a separate team?

Look at your strategy, first. What is most important in this stage? List the you have and look at what you already have in . That will be a great starting place for weighing the different organizational options.

Already have a CX Manager? Great! Go ask them for what they have experienced and what an ideal setup would look like according to them. Focus especially on how they would work with other teams and improve that collaboration, as well as what they would need to speed up implementation of the agreed CX processes & tools.

Some organizations have a dedicated CX department. This is the dream of many CMOs and CX Directors, even though we rarely see it implemented. Should you do this? To find that answer, assess how well your company is performing on CX today (TIP: try our CX maturity assessment quiz!). What are your challenges in CX? Do you want to set up a CX strategy/roadmap or dedicated CX journey projects? Need to hunt little frictions or get your data right?

Get clear on what you need to do and what your organization’s current level of maturity (experience & expertise) in each of those areas is. This understanding will drive any decision on how to structure CX responsibilities, teams, roles, … Regardless of how you decide to structure your CX team / roles, you’ll also want to make sure they are linked strongly to your market research & customer intelligence teams, as well as operations & performance teams, and still independent enough to challenge the assumptions that live throughout the organization about customer preferences and behaviors.

Remember to map training and upskilling needs and build your training plan.

Want to go further? Revisit your daily way of working

• Do you have a solid CX strategy and roadmap in place?
• Do people understand what they can do to make the CX strategy happen?
• Do people know how to develop CX initiatives and get them vetted by peers?
• Do people know what room for experimentation they have?
• Do people have flexible and low-barrier ways to get colleagues to work with them on cross-functional projects?
• Do people know who gets to decide about what?
• Do people know who to consult for certain topics?
• Do your comments and feedback promote CX reflexes?
• Does your agenda incorporate (meeting) platforms where people can talk about how they are implementing your CX vision?
• Do you even have the people who know what CX is about?
• Do you have people in the room saying “yes, but…” even when they’re not the ones to decide?
• Do you have a pragmatic and relevant way to monitor and track your CX initiatives & KPIs?

To each of these questions, you should be able to get a resounding “Yes!”. If not – let’s talk.

We always start with a conversation about what you’re facing and see what options are available to make great improvements. And if it fits, we will use our proven methodology and cross-industry experience in organization design to shape the setup that works in your organization, based on your strategy and situation. Because you cannot afford to just copy-paste an org chart from another company: your people and their talents, experiences and ideas are a unique combination, and your CX strategy and value propositions are different from your competitors’ (we hope, and if you’re not sure, call us!).