As operations manager, Celia’s responsibilities included customer service and the customer call center. Her customer service department often delivered delightful experiences to their customers, and she loved being in the driver seat. However, when one of her peers from the leadership team mentioned customer experience, they assumed that only her service department was responsible for the customer experience, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, her call center representatives were often cleaning up the mess created by a customer’s poor experience with another part of their business.
Since her team would be piloting their business’s new approach of “customer-centric innovation”, Celia wondered whether this was an opportunity to change the status quo of customer experience. She knocked on Kim’s door. “Do you have a sec?”
“Sure come on in,” replied Kim. “I wanted to talk to you too, about how we structure our innovation team and get them focused on the right objectives.”
“Perfect,” said Celia. “I’ve been reading about the power of designing an experience for the entire customer journey.” She knew that to really create a good experience for their customer, they would have to engage a cross-functional team to look at all of their interactions with the customer. “It’s not enough that the experience is good; it needs to be memorable. For that to happen we need to be consistent at every point we touch the customer” she concluded.
“Interesting,” said Kim. “Who else needs to be a part of the team to get this to work?”
Who Contributes to the Customer Experience?
Celia had been thinking about that. Marketing would need to help them to define the experience, the emotion they would invoke in their customers who took the journey with them. Disney is the “Happiest Place on Earth”; what feeling should their business evoke? “Jack can help us tie an experience to our brand,” she said. “But I’d also like to get a product manager to be a part of the team.”
A lot of their customer interaction was transactional. Although Celia would like to change that, perhaps those transactions were a place to start mapping the customer journey. “If we include someone from billing we can look at our financial transactions,” she said. “I’d also like to look at our business model. Does the way we sell our solution to our customer introduce our experience?”
Kim nodded. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to make big changes to our business model with this project but I think we can make inroads, and start to show the impact of small modifications,” she said. “Product marketing will provide the solution vision, but what about packaging and distribution?”
“Yes!” Celia replied. This would involve a different part of her operations team. “They touch the customer profoundly, often as part of the first deep engagement. I’d love for them to start thinking of their service as part of a bigger customer journey.” She knew her team was excellent at logistics, and fighting the inevitable fires that arose. It would be a challenge to get them to step back and work on the bigger picture, but she knew they would step up to the plate once they understood the customer impact.
“This is a pretty diverse team,” Celia said. “Keeping them focused and on-track will be a challenge. Do you have any ideas how to manage this?”
“Yes,” Kim replied. “Jack and I have an idea we want to run by you. Let’s go find him,” she said. It was time to put their Objective and Key Results framework to the test.