The Customer Experience Has Nothing To Do With Your Org Chart

Companies often make decisions based on how their internal teams are organized. It’s an easy trap to fall into, but it can also be a costly one.

We sometimes forget that we are not our users/customers, and that the things we’re building need to work for them and not us. Beyond that, internal silos — while important for the day to day operations of a company — often come at the expense of a well defined end-to-end customer experience. And the larger an organization is, the more likely it is to suffer from this “organizational blindness”.

For example, the Marketing team is often charged with filling the top of the proverbial “funnel” through various user acquisition efforts. At that point, it likely falls to the Product team to ensure that the customer’s experience with the website/app/event/etc is a positive one. As a customer moves further down the funnel, the responsibility will transition to a Sales team, whose job it is to convert the lead. Then the Engagement/Fulfillment team takes over and does the hard work of actually delivering on what was promised. At some point, Marketing is likely brought back in, and asked to define the ongoing experience that the customer has in the way of newsletters and other communications. And on and on. Also in the mix are groups like Customer Service/Support, Public Relations, Legal, etc — all of which have an equally important role to play in the customer journey. The same model applies, with slight variations, to every company, regardless of whether they sell a physical product or a professional service.

Hopefully these groups are talking to one another, and sharing key metrics, in order to constantly improve and optimize, but that’s not enough… without a clear, shared understanding of the customer to steer the decisions that each team makes, the result will likely be a disjointed and confusing mess. Each team will find themselves simply executing on their specific objectives, without thinking about the impact to the end user’s overall experience.

Customers don’t care about how your organization is structured. To them, your product or service is one, continuous experience, characterized by a series of touchpoints, many of which take place long before — and after — the traditionally accepted “sales cycle” that we tend to focus on.

The need for organizational structures isn’t going to change, so in order to combat this tendency to make decisions based on internal factors alone, it’s critically important that companies have a ‘user-centric’ mentality in all that they do — a common understanding that each team can rally around as they make decisions. Only then can every team in the organization ensure their actions are having a positive impact on the end user and their experience with the brand.

This shared knowledge base should include artifacts like personas— which help define who your user is, and what’s important to them — as well as user journey maps, which will provide a shared understanding of where your customer touchpoints are. And while it should go without saying, I’ll say it anyways… these items must all be developed based on actual, objective data you collect about — and from — your users, as opposed to subjective and unsubstantiated opinions of who the user is.

This was adapted in part from an article by @storyalbert, here.