How To Overcome Organizational Silo’s To Make Progress

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf the wizard calls all the creatures of Middle Earth—the elves, dwarves, men, and hobbits— to a council. Their goal is to determine what to do with the Ring that threatened to end life as they knew it. Gandalf reasoned that since the Ring was a problem for all of Middle Earth, everyone should be involved.

A Customer Experience Council (CX Council) follows Gandalf’s lead. Although, to be sure, the stakes are a little lower. Your goal with the CX Council is to gain alignment of actions toward a common goal, improving Customer Experience, a vital but not (middle) Earth-shattering purpose. 

This episode of The Intuitive Customer discusses the CX Council and how to create one for your organization. We also take a look at what their objectives should be and how to set up your meetings. The CX Council is designed to help you get everyone on board with your Customer Experience goals.

A CX Council is a team of people that represent all the different departments of your organization, from Marketing to Sales to Customer Service to Operations. Each member of the team determines how to adapt their actions to align the other departments and improve the Customer Experience. Best of all, it is inexpensive from a balance sheet perspective, so senior management is usually on board with your plan.

It was in my role at British Telecom as Customer Experience Manager that I first saw the importance of a CX Council. My program affected all the departments, but none of them were doing the same things to get to where we needed to go. Moreover, they operated so independently, like silos, that they often stepped on each other’s toes.

I realized that if I wanted to improve the Customer Experience, I needed everyone marching in the same direction toward the same goal. I also knew to do that effectively, I needed all of their buy-ins. I was from these epiphanies that the idea for a CX council was born.

Over the years in our global Customer Experience consultancy, we have learned a thing or two about CX councils, what works, and, perhaps most importantly, what doesn’t. This podcast explores the details and shares critical information about how to make them useful in your organization.

Plus, it doesn’t involve anyone fighting an Orc or walking up the side of an active volcano, so, how can you afford not to listen to it?

The Intuitive Customer podcasts help you take your Customer Experience to the next level by unlocking the “hidden” aspects of your experience and determining what really drives value for your customers.

To find out more about how your organization’s marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention, contact us at www.beyondphilosophy.com.

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