Chapter 4: How You Work
In a digital-first world, where the customer is at the center, everyone sells a service.
The challenge is how to orchestrate the full power of your organization so it can best serve the customer. Most organizations operate in rigid silos, with lots of bureaucracy, making collaboration hard. It’s a bit like watching a really bad 4 x 100-meter relay team where everyone is a great sprinter, but no one can pass the baton.
Creating one team aligned around the customer requires employees to be better empowered. They naturally need the right tools to collaborate and share information. This is the era of the augmented employee, who continually adopts new digital tools to raise their customer-facing performance. However, the need is greater than tools. Customer-facing employees also need better training to be more empathetic than before, ask better questions, and be better listeners and storytellers.
These needs in aggregate are highlighting a major deficiency in continual learning. The shift to an all-digital world has made this gap more apparent and critical. Salesforce’s Global Stakeholder Series: Future of Work, Now research surveyed more than 20,000 people around the world and found that around two-thirds feel they lack in-demand skills and wish they had access to free technical training.
The pandemic has also revealed another unresolved issue: Many workers have worrying levels of stress and concerns about health, with 79% of survey respondents saying workplace safety should be a higher priority.
- Ensure everyone believes in a customer-centric vision.
- Work across functions to collaboratively define a clear vision and strategy.
- Ensure that everyone within the organization can communicate the vision, inspire action, and align projects to the outlined strategy.
- Help employees reach their full potential.
- Equally invest in employee experiences to allow for cross-team collaboration from anywhere that improves the customer experience.
- Apply incentives to individual behaviors that drive the business goals.
- Encourage groups with different expertises to solve customer problems together.
- Empower teams to act in the customer’s best interest.
- Define your brand values and company culture in order to empower all employees to suggest improvements and better the company.
- Give teams the authority to act in the customer’s best interest. Include partners to help you drive connected customer experiences and increase value to customers and employees.
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