X: The Experience When Business Meets Design

3.0

CIRCLE OF RIFE

THE CLUSTER FUNNEL GIVES WAY TO THE CIRCLE OF RIFE

Over the years, I’ve had an increasing number of conversations with corporate executives, including some of the world’s most recognized brands, to better understand how they were thinking about the future of customer relationships. By starting with a simple question, Who owns the customer experience?, I have learned that their answers involve a complicated web of confusion, politics, frustrations, and opportunities. But that’s good news, because the answer to this question is: everyone. So the next step is to clear the obstacles that prevent true experience architecture. One of the biggest of those is the siloing of departments and responsibilities.

Customer experience strategists largely operate in silos, which by design introduces friction into the customer journey. Each department often acts as its own fiefdom, designing and managing their respective touch-points differently and adhering to differing standards and metrics, thereby causing challenges in ownership, responsibilities, and proving ROI of CX efforts.

Customer-facing departments don’t talk to one another. Marketing doesn’t talk to product development. The digital or web team talks to customers via a queuing system. The email team doesn’t work with the web team. The social media folks don’t work with customer support. Supporting agencies and consultants ...