Well-designed cross-functional processes are powerful. They create customer experiences that are effortless for the customer and more efficient for the organization.  Here’s a story that illustrates this point.

A colleague of mine visited the contact center for a well-known health insurance company and relayed this experience to me. While she was meeting with team members, she saw job aids referring to “building empathy” and delivering “apologies with heart.” The quality assurance (QA) form measured employees on how well they helped customers manage their intense emotions over delayed claims. The training content emphasized how to explain complicated claims processes.

When she met with the contact center director, she asked, “Why so much time and energy on training reps to manage customers who are disappointed… by you? Why not just fix the claim issue?”

He sighed. “It’s not that easy. The claims department has their way of doing things. We’ve tried to meet with them over this issue a few times, but the message is clear—‘stay on your side of the fence.’ We do our best, but customers express frustration every day. We can’t magically make customers okay with it.”

This gap between what customers want and what is being delivered—and I suspect you may have similar stories—is all too familiar in many organizations.

Customer-centric organizations, however, spend proportionally more time designing processes and proportionally less time getting better at appeasing unhappy customers. They devote their attention to eliminating what makes customers unhappy in the first place. Of course, glitches will still happen, and the processes you use to resolve those issues are essential. Effective complaint resolution will always be part of your CX portfolio. But that shouldn’t be the main focus.

The challenge? Without deliberate intervention, departments don’t naturally work across functional lines. The marketing team focuses on messaging and response rates. The product management team is occupied with product design and development. Billing concentrates on revenue and collections, and the contact center on meeting service levels and creating positive customer interactions. Each team fixates on being the best they can be within the boundaries of their department.

This includes areas whose managers may not fully grasp the overall impact on customer experience. The legal department requires necessary “legalese” in customer documents. The compliance area demands stringent verification to protect customers and the organization. Every department can agree that designing processes and technology with the customer in mind makes sense. Even so, being customer-focused within a silo doesn’t fix the most exasperating barriers to good experiences.

Great experiences happen by design through cross-department collaboration. They are shaped with a clear-eyed view of the customer as they traverse through the work done by marketing, product management, billing, and the contact center. That work must be coordinated and seamless for the trip to feel effortless, satisfying, and yes, sometimes even WOW. And to create that collaboration, your organization must have high-level sponsorship. Senior leaders must define a common vision and goals, and hold all accountable to pursue them.

Excerpt from Leading the Customer Experience: How to Chart a Course and Deliver Outstanding Results by Brad Cleveland.