Teaming Up: Building a Cross-Functional Customer Journey
By Kristen Hayer
Often, when we begin to engage with a company, we run across the following scenario, or something like it:
A customer emails support. It’s an angry email, with threats of churn. The support team immediately hops on the issue and discovers that it is related to a feature request that the customer logged with their CSM a month ago. They proceed to try to push it through to the product team quickly. Meanwhile, they haven’t gotten back in touch with the customer for half a day while they have been trying to coordinate a solution, so the customer calls their CSM. The CSM doesn’t know that support is all over this issue, so they also reach out the product team.
They get back to the customer to let them know what they are doing, but it has been a few hours since they got the customer’s call, so the customer has already reached out to the CEO(their friend and the reason they bought the solution in the first place), who then blows up because their buddy isn’t getting “good service” from the team.
Unfortunately, this is a common scenario – I know there are some of you reading this who have experienced it and are cringing right now – and it is preventable. I want to call out two of things about this situation before I get into how to solve it. One, everyone on the team has the customer’s best interests at heart. They are trying to solve the customer’s issue in the best way they can, and they understand the level of priority. Two, nobody is talking to each other. Teams (and the CEO) are assuming that because they got the call, they are in the best position to fix the issue and that it is on their plate. The customer is assuming inaction because they aren’t hearing back quickly. Nobody is taking the time to understand that other teams may already be working on it, and they are assuming the incompetence of other groups.
Why does this matter? Any time you have multiple teams working on the same issue you are creating a choppy customer experience. No customer loves being bounced around from team to team or feeling like they have to reach out multiple times to get a response. You’re also creating inefficiency across your organization, which, at scale, is very expensive. Any time your CEO gets sucked into a customer care situation it costs your company hundreds to thousands of dollars because they are going to want to stick with it until it is resolved. It also impacts morale – nobody likes feeling that other teams don’t think they are doing their job.
How do you fix this?
Plan Ahead – This is going to happen in your company unless you set up a plan to prevent it. Pull together a cross-functional team that includes all of your customer-facing groups and any executives who tend to get roped in on customer issues. Brainstorm a list of the situations that typically occur, then design an optimal customer journey for each of those situations. Some things will need support, others might need customer success, and still others might need to be escalated. Plan what you want the customer’s experience to be like in each situation, and then build out a playbook so your team knows who is doing what.
Create Escalation Paths – Speaking of escalations, these shouldn’t be common, but they will come up from time to time. Plan out how to tackle cross-functional escalations with 2 things in mind. First, make sure the customer experience is as smooth as possible. If you need to hand off a customer to another team, take the time to make an introduction and to let them know what is next. Next, make sure each team involved knows their role. This will ensure that teams aren’t stepping on each other’s toes. Finally, include a loop back around to all the teams involved so that they know how things were resolved. This sets everyone’s mind at ease and keeps customers from getting different answers from different contacts.
Connect Technology – Sometimes, a little visibility can prevent a lot of extra work. While you don’t want teams to feel like they need to manage each other, some visibility into things that related teams are working on can indicate that an issue is already being tackled. Technology integrations that can provide this kind of visibility include support tickets being surfaced in a CS Platform, the onboarding milestones being outlined in a CRM tool, or engineering projects being linked to a ticketing platform. Any time you have a customer-facing team working in a single tool, check to see if there are ways to push high-level information on who and what they are working on to the other customer-facing groups.
Train Your Team – All too often I see leaders doing a great job of documenting things like a new customer journey, or escalation process, or technology, and then not going over the new processes and tools with their team. You cannot count on team members to read through documentation every time you roll out something new. When was the last time you read through the release notes from a new app on your phone? Taking the time to train your team on new processes gives them a chance to ask questions and makes it more likely that they will follow them.
Acknowledge Success Stories – It is important to acknowledge early successes when you’ve introduced something new. Call out team members who managed an escalation especially well, or who followed a new customer journey leading to successful resolution. If your CEO has a sense of humor, you can even praise them for not jumping in on an issue when a customer called them directly. Reward team members who follow new processes and you’ll encourage more of the team to adopt them.
By planning ahead, connecting technology, training your team and highlighting success stories, you can move away from a chaotic “all hands on deck” customer care approach to something that is better for both the customer experience and internal efficiency.
Need help with Journey Mapping? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that can guide you. Our approach to balances creating an effortless experience for customers, with designing internal processes that use your existing technology, and improve cross-functional teamwork across your organization. Please visit TheSuccessLeague.io for more on this or our other offerings.
Kristen Hayer - Kristen founded The Success League in 2015 and currently serves as the company's CEO. Over the past 25 years Kristen has been a success, sales, and marketing executive, primarily working with growth-stage tech companies, and leading several award-winning customer success teams. She has written over 100 articles on customer success, and is the host of 3 podcasts about the field: Innovations in Leadership, CS Essentials with Gainsight, and Reading for Success. Kristen serves on the boards of the Customer Success Leadership Network, the Customer Success program at the University of San Francisco, and the Women in Leadership Program at UC Santa Barbara. She received her MBA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and now lives in San Francisco.
