MC: 0:00

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, jeanne 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.

Jeannie Walters: 0:31

I bet you've been told to break down silos when you are focusing on customer experience at your organization. We all have. It's what we all want. I'm Jeannie Walters and, thanks to this great question from Gary, we're going to talk about that today on the Experience Action Podcast.

Listener Question: 0:50

Hi, Jeannie, it's Gary Marra. Hey, we often hear the cry to break down the silos in the CX world, and certainly, in my experience managing clients, I've seen way too much functionalization in companies. But working in large financial services companies makes you aware you do need a certain degree of specialization and subject matter expertise. So how do you balance the cry for breaking down silos with the optimization that specialization provides?

Jeannie Walters: 1:16

Yes, breaking down silos. That is the rallying cry, that is the dream, because we know inherently that if we have too many silos in an organization, that is more likely to cause a fractured or challenging customer journey for the customers that we serve. So of course it makes sense to say let's break down the silos and focus on the customer journey. But Gary brings up a great point here If we don't have specialization, if we don't have people in our organization and teams and departments and tools and processes and all that go with that really focused on being a specialist, bringing that expertise to that part of the journey, then we're going to create a whole other set of problems. So how do we balance this? Well, many of us find ourselves in the crux of this trying to balance question. How do we make sure that we are having a seamless, consistent experience for our customers while at the same time not trying to be the expert across that entire journey? We can't be finance experts and supply chain experts and product design experts all at once, so we need to rely on that specialized expertise throughout an organization. So in some industries, just like we talked about with financial services, these are highly regulated industries that really require specialization. That isn't just a beneficial thing to have. It is absolutely necessary. So certain areas absolutely require deep knowledge, compliance expertise and risk management skills that we need to make sure have trained, qualified, educated, experienced people at the helm. We need to ensure that we are being compliant and staying on top of all of those different rules and regulations as part of those regulated industries. But even if you aren't in a highly regulated industry, you can't always be the expert in everything. We need people to have that expertise. So, really, this is about balancing the trust we're building with customers by having the expertise when we need it, by offering that specialization when we need it, as well as offering a consistent, seamless customer journey that all aligns around not just the purpose of the customer, but who we are as an organization and how do we show up. The customer doesn't care which department they're dealing with. They are dealing with a brand and that's who they believe they're dealing with, no matter what, as they should.

Jeannie Walters: 4:06

So let's back this up a little bit. What do we do to balance that need for specialization and expertise with that need to break down silos to create that seamless customer journey? Well, really a lot of this is about cross-functional collaboration. Now, you've heard me talk about this quite a bit and if you're familiar with our CXI navigational framework, that one of our big areas is cultural commitment because this is where you get that cross-functional support.

Jeannie Walters: 4:38

We cannot do this work alone. We need everybody involved and that means that we need to lean on those with expertise in our organization. We need to make sure that we're communicating in ways that everybody understands their role, but they also understand what happens when. What happens when we make a change in product? What happens when we start communicating differently in marketing? What happens when we have a supply chain issue? What happens when we can't finance in the same way that we could in the past? These are big questions that our customers will have pain points about if we don't have that cross-functional collaboration.

Jeannie Walters: 5:20

So the first thing I want to encourage you to do is look at where are the pain points within the customer journey. Where do you see and feel those silos, those internal silos on the outside of the organization? What are customers telling you? Are the handoffs maybe uncomfortable when they go from sales to account management or customer success? Are there bumps in the road there? Are there things that happen, where people say this is not what you promised in the sales process. That's a big red flag that maybe sales and delivery aren't talking and communicating and collaborating the best way that they can. We need to make sure that we are constantly talking about the bigger picture here of the overall customer journey and engage different groups in that process. Have some customer journey mapping going on. Invite them to customer days. Make sure they're hearing that customer feedback, not just in the form of numbers and quantitative analysis, but also in the true voice of the customer.

Jeannie Walters: 6:26

This is what moves people to understand that yes, maybe I did my job in my silo and maybe I can check that box, but what if I didn't think about that next step on the journey? What if I didn't set my colleagues up for success? What if they're getting the brunt of the complaints because we made promises that we didn't feel responsible to keep? We need to make sure that we are looking at the holistic journey as a holistic organization, but we are relying on the specialization and expertise that's needed. For example, a bank's compliance team, we want them to meet regularly with customer service and product teams to really discuss how regulatory changes will impact the customer experience? How will we better communicate with customers about these changes? How do we make sure that the products that we offer are aligned with not only the compliance but also with customer needs? So we need to constantly look for who do we need to bring into this discussion about the customer experience, cross-functional collaboration?

Jeannie Walters: 7:36

Well, we use something called a CX Charter. This is a document that we use to really set the stage for cross-functional teams. They can be short-term or long-term, but you need to have something that everybody understands, that explains what are you trying to do, what are your goals, what are the outcomes you're looking to achieve, who's doing what when? Some of the basics here we have to get back to, because often when we invite people into these cross-functional collaborative situations, they think this is fun, for a day, and then they go back to their desk and they go back to their lives and they kind of forget about it because they're not held accountable. They're not seeing the results. They're not seeing the outcomes. If you have that cross-functional collaboration using a tool like a CX Charter, you can actually outline how often will we check in? When do we expect this to be done? What do we do if we run into barriers? Have those conversations up front so there are no surprises for those people involved.

Jeannie Walters: 8:40

Now, when it comes to that expertise that we need to rely on, we can't pull people out of that. Sometimes they're entrenched in what they have to do, especially around things like compliance. So think about this, and sometimes people call this T-shaped skills. This is where we want people to have a broad understanding about what is the customer journey, what is customer experience, but then have their expertise, have a deep knowledge about their expertise and specialization. If we can do this well, if we can have cross-functional collaboration and better communication and T-shaped skills and an understanding that we're all in this together, then there's another rallying cry that we have here, which is CX is everyone's business.

Jeannie Walters: 9:30

That means that you can maybe have certain parts of your job that are very deep. You're only focused on one thing you put your blinders on, but you can't do that for everything. You have to make sure that you understand your role, your team's role and that rule's role in the customer journey, and so if we can achieve that, that will really help us have collaborative problem solving, better communication and, frankly, happier employees. So this is really something that I think is critical to most organizations. But you are right, Gary, we talk about this and we don't really give how-tos. So I really appreciate you asking this question, because we want to make sure that we are not only providing seamless customer journeys, but we're empowering employees to do their best work with what they've been assigned to do, and sometimes what they've been assigned to do, and sometimes what they've been assigned, is very deep knowledge and expertise, and that specialization we need to rely on because we're not the experts in everything. So, in the end, this is about creating a culture where expertise doesn't isolate, it empowers. This is about making sure that we come together as a group on behalf of the ultimate goal, which is providing that wonderful customer experience, not only for our customer, but also to make things better for our employees and better outcomes for our organization. By bridging this specialized knowledge with cross-functional communication and collaboration, companies can build a customer experience that's not only seamless but also skilled and specialized.

Jeannie Walters: 11:09

Great question. Thank you so much for asking this. I encourage you, if you're listening to this and you have another question or you've been thinking about something, reach out to me, leave me a message at askjeannievip. You can record it on your phone or your desktop. It's super easy to do and we absolutely love hearing from you. Now, until next week, keep up the great work that you are doing, breaking down those silos, creating cross-functional collaboration and communicating in better ways across your organization on behalf of your customers. Thanks so much for being here and we'll talk again soon To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigatorscom, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.