Building the best customer experience with interdepartmental engagement: The “how” and “why”
Customer success professionals preach a lot of focus on interaction and follow-up with customers to maintain their happiness with a product. However, in those moments of interaction, we’re honing in on one theme to gauge customer satisfaction. What about happiness conservation throughout the entire customer journey? And how do you work to build this?
This is where every company department comes in. Yes — all of them. If you want the best customer experience from start to finish, it is imperative that you receive ideas and perspectives from all around the table and then work together to execute with a consistent brand message and tone. Company departments have different business objectives and KPIs, but they all have a part in the customer experience. Every employee has a purpose, and there’s no better way to maximize their backgrounds, knowledge, experiences, and philosophies than to include them in such an important (and sometimes convoluted) process.
Check out some interdepartmental techniques we practice here at BombBomb to build the best experience we can for our customers.
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Stress the importance of cross-team collaboration.
At BombBomb, we collaborate so much it’s almost second-nature. Collaborating with another team may sound like a hassle, but the benefits actually outweigh the disadvantages.
When teams work together on a project or initiative, upfront expectations are more clearly defined thanks to direct interaction. Clarifying those expectations also demands an owner for the project to ensure accountability. You don’t want two departments accidentally double-tapping duties and doing unnecessary work, risking miscommunication of what’s expected, or even communicating similar messages that have completely different tones.
When people from different teams collaborate on an initiative, it forces different minds to grab pieces of information and complete a puzzle — together. And since you’re communicating openly and heavily, all teams are on the same page along the way and, if everything goes well, the collaboration will encourage professional relationship-building.
Our Customer Success department frequently partners with the Sales department to help refine and improve the sales process. In order to ensure our customers have a great experience with us from sign-up to adoption, we train together on things like finding the right customers, sales language, business use cases, handling objections, and more. Good synergy and alignment are critical to achieving a successful customer experience.
Know what each department is good at…and use them for it.
We’re in a weird time of “strengthening your weaknesses,” but using your strengths isn’t wrong; whatever happened to using your powers for the greater good?
Your talent can be a perishable skill, and there’s no better way to let people know who to approach for different needs than recognizing a department’s strengths. If you need something done and you need it done immaculately, look at the big picture of which department is best.
This simple resolution for completing a task or project is a useful way to gain a holistic view of what’s going on in the company. Additionally, you can let a department do what they do best while you work on how to complement their needs along the way. We’re all aiming for a goal to fulfill the needs of our organization, so don’t entrench yourself in your own responsibilities when you could be doing what’s best for the business.
For example, if BombBomb creates a new feature for our platform, we go to Marketing to create the value proposition, Development to build user-friendly functionality, Product to manage the release process, Customer Success to give insight on customer needs and problems…you get the idea.
Include department representatives when outlining the customer journey.
You don’t always need every department member for a meeting — that can get crowded and hinder overall productivity. But what you do need are department representatives who can speak to what their teams feel are the most valuable factors to include in the customer experience.
Each department has their own justified contribution to the customer journey, so you should trust their expertise. This means having an objective piece of the puzzle; identifying themes or patterns is stronger than what people may “feel” or “think.” Having a liaison from each department is a good way to organize team ideas and inform bigger groups with less mess.
Using departmental expert knowledge also avoids the potential of siloing the customer experience, which should be very well-rounded. At BombBomb, only necessary people are included in customer journey development — but we make sure every department has a voice in the process.
Something we did when crafting our own customer journey was we pulled in department representatives to get insight on the strategy, verbiage, and pathways that customers experience when they sign on with us. We relied on them to advise what was best when viewing the entire scope of the journey. This included looking at everything from email campaigns, onboarding screens, and training sessions to resources, customer service language, retention plans, and more.
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Growth is what keeps a business running, but growing does not come without improvements and refining the process; this is why the customer journey is so important. Think of a service or product in your life you continue to enjoy or cannot imagine yourself without, even through all the bumps and updates — don’t you want your customers to feel that sense of loyalty with your product or service?
To get to this point, you can’t rely on one department with just a few major competencies to know how to create a quality customer experience, which demands several. Rely on all your departments to use as many skills as possible — and together, you’ll learn, grow, and succeed.
There’s not one company out there that maintains perfect interdepartmental engagement; we’re still working through this, too. This is why it’s helpful to share tips and recommendations with one another on how we can all improve this process and get closer to having more aligned, harmonious, and customer-centric businesses.
Do you include employees from different departments in the process of developing the customer journey? What techniques do you employ in your business to build the best customer experience possible?
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