Chapter 4: How You Work
One Team Aligned Around Your Customer
Most organizations 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 organizations 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 center.
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
To get aligned, companies need to center 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.
How CarMax Creates a Great Customer Experience
As the largest used car retailer in the United States, CarMax invites customers to buy online, in the store, or a seamless combination of both. Follow CarMax digital merchandising teams as they pivot to present cars online in a way that ignites desire, builds consumer confidence, and drives customers to purchase.
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 organization 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 behaviors 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.
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What does Salesforce do?
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State of the Connected Customer
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The Salesforce Way
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How To Create a Customer-Centric Experience
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