CX Team: Should it be a strategic or a tactical role?

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There are many sides to CX (Customer Experience) roles in an organization. Some are more strategic that involve research and innovation, while others are more tactical to provide customer support or call centers. Often, these are treated as two separate functions within the organization. This is neither right nor wrong, but rather, what is relevant for the organization.

When building the CX team at Farmacare, I wondered what kind of team would be suitable for such a young, dynamic, and relatively small organization. I wanted the CX team to be both strategic and tactical, and to be embedded closely with the other functions of the organization so that it can be the red thread that embeds the voice of the customers into the organization.

After several iterations, we now have the CX team play three key roles:

Three main roles of CX team at Farmacare

Role 1: Support

The first role is to provide support to potential and existing customers on daily basis, by answering questions and providing solutions to problems faced by our customers. In this role, the team works closely with Tech Ops to troubleshoot technical issues, provide speedy resolution, and to avoid the same issue to occur again in the future.

Role 2: Education

The CX team provides education for customers on several layers:

• Product demo for potential customers, to showcase how the application can help with the customer pain points, in partnership with the sales team
• Workshop and training for customers so they can get the most value from using the application, including education for new features and updates
• Content development such as self-help, tutorials, and tips to be shared through digital channels, in partnership with the marketing team

Role 3: Research

In this role, the team is set to provide strategic input to the product and the whole business, by performing:

• Product research to uncover customer needs and behaviors, which is then synthesized to inform product direction and features roadmap
• Product testing to review product under development, to ensure there is no issue when the product is released, and to make sure the team can provide the best support and education related to these features
• CX evaluation by collecting quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers on their customer satisfaction, willingness to recommend our product, and any input for overall improvements.

Quarterly cadence embedded into product sprints

The benefits

We have had this arrangement for about 2 quarters now. By having the team work on tactical and strategic levels, here are several interesting benefits that I observe:

1. Ability to predict and prepare — by supporting the customers every day, the team builds deep contextual knowledge and understanding of various use cases faced by the customers. This is very useful as they can predict what might go wrong when evaluating a feature under development, and how to prepare for those scenarios
2. Ownership towards the product — by involving the team in the product development stage, they have more ownership towards the product and feel the importance of developing a useful and easy-to-use product, to make their job easier when supporting the customers later on
3. Learning culture — as the team is evolving, there is always something new for the team to learn. May it be learning new skills, new tools, new customer segments, or researching different parts of the customer journey. This creates a positive learning culture.

What do you think? How should a CX team be structured? Would love to hear about your experiences and have a discussion about this :)