Chapter 4: How You Work

One Team Aligned Around Your Customer

Time to read: 3 minutes

According to our State of the Connected Customer report, 85% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. They want to communicate with one company, not separate departments.

Most organisations operate with a level of bureaucracy that makes internal collaboration difficult. It's like a really bad 4 x 100-meter relay team where everyone is a great sprinter, but no one can pass the baton.

It’s time for organisations to work as one unified team, aligning all departments around customer data. This ensures everyone gets a single, shared view of your customers. Think of it as a circle of information about the customer, with the customer in the centre.

So, if a customer calls your service team about a product issue, there’s no need for the service agent to reach out to the product team or ask the customer for their purchase details. The service agent can easily look up the information that the sales team captured when the customer made their purchase. Service can then quickly and directly respond to the customer’s needs.

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.

How You Gain Alignment

According to research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 53% of companies report that overcoming organisational silos is one of the top five challenges to improving customer experience.

Fifty-three percent of companies report that overcoming organisational silos is one of the top-five barriers to improving CX.

Building internal organisational trust is one key to overcoming this challenge and gaining alignment. We often assume that tools like reporting structures, process methodologies, and formal contracts ensure a shared understanding. We prefer to jump straight into our projects and start making progress. However, successful companies will take an intentional and formal approach to gain alignment — both at the outset and then on a continuous basis.

To get aligned, companies need to centre employee accountability on customer outcomes. Whether employees are in the office or working remotely, you need to consider carefully how you communicate with them and empower them to make decisions that best serve your customers.

Key Actions to Take

Ensure everyone aligns around a customer-centric vision

Work across teams and departments to collaboratively define a clear vision, strategy, and the metrics for success.
Ensure that everyone within the organisation can communicate the vision, inspire action, and align projects to the outlined strategy.
Practice radical transparency: Build trust faster by being courageous enough to have difficult conversations and share the rationale behind your decisions.

Help employees reach their full potential

Equally invest in employee experiences to allow for cross-team collaboration from anywhere that improves the customer experience.
Incentivize behaviours that support business goals.
Encourage groups with different areas of expertise to solve customer problems together.

Empower teams to act in the customer’s best interest

Define your brand values and company culture, empowering 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.
Train customer-facing employees to be more empathetic, ask better questions, and be better listeners and storytellers.

Chapters

01

Successful Business Transformation Starts with Your Mindset

02

How You Build Trust: Listen, Anticipate, and Respond

03

How You Engage Customers: Build Customer-Centric Business Processes

04

How You Work: One Team Aligned Around Your Customer

05

How You Embrace Technology: Be Digital-First, Lean, and Ethical by Design

06

How You Serve Society: Make Your Business a Platform for Change

Customer Relationships Resources

Guide

Boost engagement by delivering the experiences your customers want

Top Digital Innovation Resources

Video

How Pine Labs created a Customer 360 vision with Salesforce

Blog

How Salesforce is helping businesses in India to build resilience for the new normal

Up Next: How You Embrace Technology

So you’ve moved to a culture of collaboration and sharing. Now it’s time to take action to embrace technology and ensure it’s used in ethical and humane ways.

How You Embrace Technology: You Can be Digital-first, Lean, and Ethical by Design

Read on to discover how to:

Shift from “departmental IT” to a holistic, digital operating model
Simplify technology to empower the people closest to your customers
Ensure ethics are central to your approach

Check out chapter 5

Up Next: How You Embrace Technology

So you’ve moved to a culture of collaboration and sharing. Now it’s time to take action to embrace technology and ensure it’s used in ethical and humane ways.

Read on to discover how to: