Aligning Your Organization Around Customer Experience

In part one of this series we showed you how to benchmark your CX maturity and start building a customer journey. Now we will discuss the importance of organizational alignment around CX, and give you the tools you need to rally your company around the customer.

Delivering impactful digital experiences means aligning your entire organization around customer needs and expectations. However, 40 percent of marketers say that different functions in their company work in silos when it comes to customer experience. To get everyone aligned around your digital experience initiatives, you should focus on three areas:

1. Goals and vision
2. Communication and collaboration
3. Roles and skills

Goals and vision

Make sure IT, marketing and the rest of the organization are aligned around your goals and vision for digital experience, and how it relates to your larger customer experience strategy.

For Northwell Health, the largest healthcare provider in New York State, getting alignment around their vision of reinventing healthcare is an ongoing process which began with a focus on the patient experience.

Groups across the organization participated in a workshop in which they created a story map of the patient journey, which included everything from hospital check-in to follow-up doctor visits. Through this exercise, participants were able to see how all steps of the patient journey are connected, and better understand the roles they play in delivering the best experiences to patients.

“The ROI of journey mapping is realized when all employees understand how to align their activities to customer expectations.” - Forbes

Communication and collaboration

Getting others in your organization to support digital customer experience initiatives and technologies starts with speaking their language. For example, your CEO and CFO will sit up and take notice if you talk about how your digital experience platform pays off in terms of growth and revenue, whereas the CIO will be most interested in the security of your DX platform, and how well it integrates with the systems your company already has.

When trying to get buy-in for your DX initiatives, keep these tips in mind:

• Explain your objectives: Clearly explain what you are trying to achieve with digital customer experience, and how you’ll measure success.
• Address objections: Think about what’s most important to the audience you’re addressing, and be ready to address their specific objections.
• Speak the right language: Use terms like ROI, revenue, competitive differentiation and growth when speaking to the CEO and CFO. For the CIO, talk cost control, security, innovation, data privacy, data reuse, efficiency and speed.

Roles and skills

Fifty-five percent of organizations agree that the digital skills gap in their organization has widened over the last couple of years, and that they’ve lost competitive advantage due to talent shortage. The shortage of digital skills spans from hard skills like analytics and cybersecurity, to soft skills like customer-centricity and passion for learning.

Here are some ways you can prevent your own organization from falling prey to the digital skills gap:

• Define a digital skills vision: Identify the skills you’ll need to accomplish your digital customer experience initiatives.
• Conduct a skills gap analysis: Take inventory of the skills your organization currently has. Compare where you are now to where you’d like to be in the future.
• Acquire skills to close the gap: Build up digital skills using innovative training programs and targeted recruiting tactics, and create a network of vendor partners for outsourced expertise.

If you’d like to speak more about digital customer experience investment, contact us here. And join us for part three of this series where we will discuss measuring the success of your experience platforms.