Cross-Functional Communication

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready set action. One, two three, four.

Hello, Customer Experience Change Agents. It is time for another episode of Experience Action, the podcast where I, Jeannie Walters, answer your questions whenever you leave me a voicemail, so let's listen in now.

Hi Jeannie. This is Kiah from the Experience Investigators team. This question came to us from a participant at one of our recent webinars: Once you have buy-in, how do you promote and motivate CX getting to the rest of the organization? We have a cross-functional team, but they don't always go back and share the information with their teams. What can we do to improve this communication?

Communication in customer experience is so incredibly important. We literally cannot emphasize it enough. You know, when I work with clients all over, one of the things I hear is frustration, because sometimes customer experience is treated as a project or a program or something to check off the list. But really customer experience is about who we are, how we show up and what we actually do for our customers, not the products and services that we sell, but what happens to their lives, their businesses, their roles because of the products and services and the actual experience we give them along the journey as a customer with our brand. So I love the awareness of this question, because many of us are in the situation, as customer experience leaders, where we might have a slightly ragtag team of leaders who want to contribute, who believe they understand, who are eager to be part of something called customer experience, but then when we ask them to bring back specific instructions or ideas or feedback loops to their separate teams, sometimes that just falls to the end of the to-do list. So what can we do? Well, first of all, if you have a cross-functional team, consider yourself lucky, because not everybody does. But if you have that cross-functional buy-in, make sure that you are effectively managing that team and the meetings that you have with them in a way that drives progress forward. I see a lot of organizations who have what they call customer experience councils or teams and they get together and they basically look over the numbers of customer feedback and they say, " Hey, Joe, your engineering team should really look at this thing from a customer and this complaint and this number and let us know what you're going to do about that. So Joe goes back to his team with very good intentions, by the way, and then Joe gets, you know, distracted, like we all do, with the daily tasks at hand, and so maybe that customer experience discussion never really comes up, and the reason it never comes up is because Joe is not really held accountable. Joe doesn't have the right kind of authority, maybe, or even influence, to make the changes that are coming up in customer feedback. So as you develop these meetings and these teams, make sure you are structured in the right ways. We can't always have influence and authority over our colleagues. We don't have the right to say to the product team change your whole roadmap, right? We need to figure this out for our customers. That's not what we're looking for. We need to collaborate and co-create and make sure there is so much engagement that the communication is happening because of that. So a few ideas for you if you are in this situation. One is make sure you have very clear goals around what this team is and what the expectations are. This is the jJoe reason we developed our tool called a customer experience charter. Now, if you have a team of folks who are really trying to move forward with customer experience efforts, the last thing you want to do is have them attend a meeting that is unproductive. If you don't have focused goals, if you don't have specific ways that you're asking people to participate, then you're wasting everybody's time. I hate to say that, but it might be true. So if this is one of those hard truths in your organization, a couple tools that we have. One is the customer experience charter document. This is where you outline what are organizational goals, what are the efforts, who's involved, who's doing what when, what are we all committed to here? Because that way, when people attend your meetings, when they become part of that team, they know what the expectations are there is no doubt about that and you know what people roll in and out of these teams. They don't necessarily stay there for the long haul. So having the charter document actually helps set expectations for anybody coming in at any point. The other thing for that meeting specifically is we have specific ways that we like to run those meetings. There are resources at Experience Investigators where you can find out, you know, what's an agenda, how should we do this, how do we follow up and hold people accountable, what's the best way to set those expectations? So take a look at that, because setting expectations is all about connecting with the bigger picture. And again, this is where customer experience management within an organization can be so challenging, because everything feels like a priority and there are a lot of ad hoc things going on. Everything feels like a priority and there are a lot of ad hoc things going on. Maybe you have customer journey mapping happening in one group and you are completely separate from the voice of the customer group or the customer insights group. We want to bring all of that together around your customer experience mission and defining what success looks like, so you know exactly what to do. So anytime you are bringing this team together, you want to start with the mission and your overall goals. Remind everybody. This is why we're here. This is why all win if we do this well The last thing we want is for somebody to walk away from that meeting and think, yeah, it's nice nice, mean, I would love to be nicer to customers, but we just don't have time for that. I'm sure you've heard this. So, setting those expectations from the beginning, having clear goals, making sure that's documented and communicated with that core group, and then make sure you're actually asking for them to do something. Now again, this might sound so basic, but think about how many meetings people have where we walk away and we say, yeah, that was a good meeting. We talked a lot about different ideas. I'm glad other people are going to take care of that, because if we don't have a specific action that we are asking our team members to take, then how can we expect them to actually deliver on that? They will go back to their teams and get distracted. There will be short-term issues that feel very urgent, that take priority over these customer experience efforts. So we want to get very clear on everybody's call to action and you want to not just document that, but say that out loud, confirm at the end of the meeting. This is all best practices, not just about customer experience but about meetings in general. general. w i Then we want to follow up. We want to have proactive ways to check in and say, hey Joe, how did that conversation go? Is there anything you need from me? Can I support you in this? Joe might say, oh gosh, I totally forgot, we haven't gotten there yet. You then can be prepared. You can say you know what? I found some quotes from our customers in recent customer feedback that I think might help you tell this story. Or, hey, joe, could I come in and help you facilitate a journey mapping session just around this issue? Do we need to do some root cause analysis to figure out why this keeps happening? Be a resource, but be proactive here. Don't just wait for them to come back to that next meeting and shrug and say, oh yeah, we didn't get to that, and shrug and say, oh yeah, we didn't get to that. We need to empower and engage and make sure that we are providing the right resources, support tools, whatever we need, so that that leader is successful. And that's the focus. If we are only communicating about bad news and we are only communicating in a way that is punitive, meaning that we go to these different department heads and we say thanks for being at this meeting. You know customers are really complaining about this thing. You better fix that. They're going to start running down the hallway when they see us. They're going to start running down the hallway when they see us. So communication is really about this idea of let's set the right expectations, let's make sure we are asking specifically for action, not just assuming that we are following up and that we are recognizing and rewarding the people who do this well. So if you have one of those leaders who takes that call to action and really moves forward with their team, then when they bring that information back, you want to celebrate that. You want to show the rest of the organization and the rest of the team what can happen. When we work together in this way on behalf of our customers, we all win. Our organizational results go up. We want to celebrate the leader who is doing so well, give them some of that public recognition and then, at the end of the day, we need to make sure that we are never, ever wasting people's time. And unfortunately I have heard this feedback from different leaders. They say, yeah, I know I go to these meetings, I'm part of this team, I'm going to stop going. It's not worth my time. That's because they don't understand how these efforts are connected to the bigger organizational goals. They don't see a way that they personally will be rewarded for this, see a way that they personally will be rewarded for this, and they don't feel confident about what they're being asked to do. So anytime we are communicating, we really need to be very clear about the goals, the actions, the results and the recognition. We also, of course, can lean into some of the ways that we work today. Do you have collaborative channels that might help, things like Slack or Teams, where you can have a conversation about everything going on in CX and give people that real-time support that sometimes they're looking for. They can also get inspired by what other team members are doing with the information and then, if you're still struggling getting people to really bring this back and do things with it, ask people to be a communication champion. I have seen this work where sometimes organizations can work hand in hand with their internal communications group, or you can also just find maybe a more junior person on the team and invite them in and say your job is to communicate this. Help us understand what's the best way to communicate to this team. You know, one of the things that is challenging is that if you have an engineering team, that might be a very different set of needs around communication than a marketing team or a social media team. It's just different people with different skill sets. We need to meet them where they are. And if you're looking for oh my gosh, where do we start with this? Use the tools in your toolkit. Do a little journey map about what should this look like? Figure out what are those processes, tools, technology and people that we need in order to deliver that. So when you're thinking about communicating around customer experience, remember the job is never, ever done. We need to build momentum, moment by moment, with the right communication. Great question, I can feel you working hard. I know that all of you out there are really moving mountains every single day, because this is not magic wand stuff. This is real work. We need to get clear on what we're doing and why we're doing it, and every day, I know every single one of you is moving forward on behalf of your customers to make this a better world, and man, I can't think of many things that are a stronger mission for those of us who do this work. So thank you for all that you're doing. Thank you for the fabulous questions. Keep them coming coming. AskJeannie. vip is where you want to leave me a voicemail, and if you're a little shy and don't want to leave your voice or you don't want to say your name, you are free not to say your name and leave me an anonymous question we get those all the time. Or if you want to send it to us via email or through any of our social channels, you are welcome to do that as well, and we'll have a team member read it, just like we did today. So thanks to everybody who is listening in, who's watching on YouTube, and don't forget that you can find a lot on our YouTube channel. So if you haven't checked that out yet, I encourage you to do that, and I hope to see you at an upcoming webinar or LinkedIn Live or just in the general interwebs. Say hi, let me know how you're doing and let us know if we can ever support you and the incredible work that you do. Don't forget my mission is to create fewer ruined days for customers, and you being here with me helps me live that mission. So thank you so much and I'll see you next time. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience. Check out free resources at experienceinvestigators. com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.