Building the CX Experience Across Silos

Many thanks to Maria Pilar Bou for suggesting this topic. Her question was, “How so I start working on a CX strategy that considers every customer-centered team (Sales, Customer Support, Customer Success)?”

While it should be natural for customer-focused teams to work together to build a great customer experience, it’s also true that each team has its own goals and success metrics that can get in the way of designing and delivering a great customer experience. Here are three steps to vanquish the silos.

Spend time convincing the other teams that it’s a good idea

Jumping into action may be tempting–and working on a joint initiative will, most likely, bring organizations closer together. Still, getting that initial commitment to work together may require some persuasive diplomacy. I like to start with the party(ies) most likely to join the effort. So if you head the Support team, start with Customer Success since Customer Success executives understand that customer experience drives adoption, which drives retention and expansion. If you head the Customer Success team, start with Support.

Strategic sales managers understand that a better customer experience drives referrals and expansion sales, and in a world where trials and freemium often precede sales, it’s hard to deny the value of a common CX strategy. If you do encounter resistance from the Sales team that you cannot overcome, start with the teams that are interested and aim to add others down the road.

Define personas 

Start by defining personas, or customer archetypes, that matter for the entire organization. It’s likely that some efforts have already been made to define personas, so start with what already exists. If the personas were defined for marketing and sales purposes, you may find that the existing set is not sufficient to encompass the entire user experience, or is too detailed for the CX initiative–and sometimes both. On the other hand, the Support team in particular may be considering only hands-on users, the ones who log issues, and that’s too reductive.

Aim to work with 5-8 personas and embrace imperfection. In my experience, it’s common to quickly get agreement on a small set of essential personas and have to experiment a bit with the others, merging and unmerging them and often working on journeys (in the next steps) to test them out before reaching agreement.

Define customer journeys

Once you have defined the personas, it’s time to build customer journeys, identifying activities and assets to support these activities, from pre-sales onward. This can take multiple hands-on workshops over a period of a few weeks, and a few heated moments. (Embrace the heated moments as proof that the team members are engaged and invested in working together.)

Be vigilant about having all team members opine about each step in the journey: encourage questions from “post-sales” teams about “pre-sales” activities, and vice-versa. An outside view forces the group to clarify its thinking and may highlight weaknesses, and solutions. And pay particular attention to defining clear handoffs and overlaps between teams.  For instance, the CSM may be introduced way before the sale closes so the briefing from the sales rep to the CSM may occur weeks before an actual handoff.

At the end of the exercise, you will have journeys that define the overall customer experience, and also, and more important, a team that can work together, respect each other, and continue refining the customer experience. Expect to review and revise the journeys at least once a year after that.