CX is Not a Department - My Journey
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First, I apologize for the length of this article. Not often do I get over 2000 words out in a single sitting.
Second, this was a long process. I guess some of these memories are for my kids.
My Journey
In this article, I share how I arrived at a customer service desert, designed customer service solutions across the globe, graduated to a CX consultant, and fell on my face.
I went back to the classroom & now have a mission.
Hope you enjoy the trip.
A BIT OF Background
I was approached by a large Customer Experience (CX) technology vendor and asked if I could prepare a talk for them at their annual customer event. Now, this was not an unusual ask during my corporate gig as my employer often put me on stages 🎤 (yes, you'll read this again below) around the world. Seems not every employee working in tech likes to get up on stage - strange. So, this is much of the narrative of that talk I gave. Hope there is something you enjoy or perhaps even learn from this.
Opening SCENE
My wife and I were on a long-awaited hiking holiday in the mountains last autumn. Now, it really doesn't matter where you live or where you might go on holiday as the experience I will share happens everywhere. Leave a comment about where this has happened to you. 🏔️
Hiking holidays take a bit more planning, unlike a beach holiday. At the beach each day is waking and going to the beach, perhaps one day you rent a kayak but it is all pretty contained. Hiking means searching for a new destination every time. Our plan was each day we would depart early and plan on ending our trek in the early afternoon at a place to eat a late lunch. 🥾
This being the 2020s, most of our planning happens, of course, digitally. Just like the days before, we had planned our route, the destination, and a place to eat, followed by a bus ride back to the place we were staying.
Our hike was planned using Komoot with some input from the local tourist information.
The bus schedule was available on Google Maps with real-time updates.
The lunch spot we found in a tourist brochure.
We checked the restaurant's website, read a few online reviews, and were excited to have a spot at the end of our day’s hike.
All boxes checked ✅
After the heat of the summer the early signs of Autumn were welcomed and we embarked on our hike. 📲
Opening hours from their website. Tues-Sun 7:30 am-11:00 pm
We neared the end of the hike and entered the village where the restaurant was located. As we approached the restaurant we saw that something was clearly not right. There were no cars parked in the parking lot nor people milling around. A chalkboard out front announced that they were closed today until dinner service.
Monday & Tuesday opens at 5pm
We were crushed. We were tired and hungry and with nothing else in this village other than a school, a church, a few houses, and a bus stop we headed to the later and went home. 😡
What does this have to do with #CX not being a Department?
Debugging the Problem
A few weeks later I interviewed Professor Tarr from the University of Denver for my New Normal podcast. She teaches brand development, marketing as well as customer experience development. We were talking about the challenges companies have in aligning their departments so that a consistent customer experience is delivered.
One reason this is hard to achieve is due to the separate departments all tasked with delivering their objectives at times not aligning with a seamless customer journey. I told her of my experience while on holiday and she told me that even really small businesses have silos - have departments too.
That was the problem.
The restaurant had decided that opening for Tuesday's lunch was either not that popular or they perhaps had staffing challenges. All valid points. However, the person responsible for updating their website and Google profile was not informed.
So, just like with larger corporations, it is a departmental problem. At least I hope so. More likely there is a single person who runs the business and is also responsible for the "internet stuff".
Going back in Time
I moved to Germany right before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1988. I learned quickly that it was known as a “Customer Service Desert” (Servicewüste). I had grown up with toll-free service lines, extended customer service hours, and how “the customer was king”. Sure, this is a dated reference but then the customer was treated very well. I had had many "good customer experiences" and just knew something would change here in Germany.
Opening hours in 1988
Perhaps my naive, young self wanted to make that change. It was likely not my motivation but a few years later I joined AT&T in Germany. I knew AT&T from my childhood, the long-distance phone company. They were also the company delivering those 1-800 numbers. Those "free" calls you made to businesses large and small. The concept of "free phone calls" was very foreign in Germany. ☎️
So, I joined AT&T, and being American, all my colleagues and likely a few clients expected me to know how to design a customer experience. This was the late 1990s and there was the Dot-Com boom but also a boom of businesses adding modern call centers to handle the newly introduced toll-shared phone numbers. Germany couldn't go straight to toll-free and made callers pay to sit in a queue while waiting on the next service agent.
An early highlight for me was designing the first global follow-the-sun 24-hour, 7 days-a-week call center solutions for Lufthansa. Looking back today it seems like a no-brainer but before I built this solution, Lufthansa travelers had to dial local Lufthansa offices when they traveled outside of Germany. Also, the German center was open for only 10 hours a day. ✈️
I was tasked with designing a system that connected Melbourne, Germany, Dublin, New York & LA. Passengers could call the Lufthansa number and would be seamlessly directed to the next open location. It was a massive undertaking but the reason for this project was to meet the customer where they were and when they needed assistance. 🌎
Sidenote:
At the opening of the Melbourne location, a senior manager flew in from Germany to celebrate the achievement. He wanted to “listen in” on one of the first calls and experience this achievement. Local management was terrified a caller complaining about lost baggage would be on the line and we were asked to “fix it”. A script was written and when the senior manager sat with the designated agent the phone rang - “first-class ticket for me and my wife Frankfurt to Phuket please”. Smiles all around.
I have no idea how that happened. ☺️
CX Struggles
In the early 2000s, those call centers morphed into contact centers. CRM solutions came to be known as the “single source of knowledge” solutions. The phone was not the only method for contacting a business. More channels were added to engage customers “where they were”. During the middle of my career, I moved into “customer service strategy” and then soon after called it “customer experience strategy”.
I would run workshops aimed at uncovering the weaknesses in service processes; one to optimize them but also to address spots where improvements could be made. We created “customer journey maps, from where the contact began until its resolution. I felt this was really going to improve real Customer Experiences. All this time I was working with the customer care department. We had all the right people in the room. This was going to be great!
We thought this was CX journey mapping
However, this "adding of channels" overwhelmed most of my clients. They were tasked by someone higher up to "add email and service our customers". So, I showed up with an email solution and installed it. Then the next call was to add web chat. You see where this is headed. Each of these "channels" was a silo. Each one had its own "brain" and needed to be managed.
Agents are regularly asked to look at the email which the customer had just sent and the agent would have to say "I don't have access to the email tool". Oh boy. Other problems remained when a caller was asking for a certain product they had seen on sale and the agent had no information about a sale. Again, silos doing their best!
Big Stage
By 2010, I was seen as "sexy enough?" to put on stage. There was a new channel coming quickly and businesses had little understanding of how to approach it. Social media was the up-and-coming “new kid on the block” and it was my luck I had been in a deep dive from the onset. I had a social media solution to take to clients and have their customers communicate with them.
You can again guess, this was but another silo. I don't mean to knock on my former employer, all the solutions out there had the same problem. Times were changing quickly and technology was lagging. Today, they all have solved this technology silo problem. I went from conference to conference telling a story of how those in the audience must address their failing customer experience solutions. 🎤
I had the solution!
Take down those silos!
I would preach that the separate departments within a business were the reason why the customer experience was constantly bad. I would honestly stand in front of hundreds and thousands of conference attendees and tell them their business needs to be completely rebuilt. Boy, was I wrong.
Digital.Done.Right.
The pandemic exposed all the weaknesses in businesses. I was not going into shops to “browse around” but still wanted to shop. I went online and searched for local businesses where I might learn a bit about what they have on offer, something current and up-to-date. Again a desert.
I work with companies and startups to “design their online experiences”. Designing processes for making sure what a customer “sees” on the website is the same on social media and is reflected in online reviews.
Head blown
In 2022 I had the opportunity to participate in a 2-day Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) exam preparation boot camp. The instructor, Daniel Ord from OmniTouch International, I had known for a few years but had not spent much time looking into the CCXP organization or learnings. So, I signed up for the boot camp and was ready to learn Customer Experience.
Well, one of the very first lessons was “what is CX”?
“The perception that customers have of an organization - one that is formed based on interactions across all touchpoints, people, and technology over time.”
"The perception that customers have of an organization - one that is formed based on interactions across all touchpoints, people, and technology over time."
It was on the morning of the first day when this was discussed. A thought began creeping into my head, "across all touchpoints, people, and technology...". So, how could all the effort I had put into designing and building the best customer care solutions solve the CX problem? It couldn't. 🤯
Of course, this was so obvious. Over the 2 days, the layers of the onion were removed and a point came where it was all very clear to me, I was so wrong. Tearing down those silos was not going to fix the CX conundrum. The silos are needed to provide the structure to a business, even a small business like Professor Tarr had spoken about.
Here is an article I wrote about the Bootcamp experience.
The takeaway?
CX is not a department but must be embedded in every department, every silo.
CirclING Back
So, now four months after my hiking trip, I reached out again to that restaurant. I asked them what “broke down” in their process. Did I get a reply? No. What does that tell me? Many things. It tells me that they have not come to understand the role of digital in their business.
If a customer stands in front of an employee and asks a question that employee should at least acknowledge the question. Many, perhaps most "offline" businesses have not come to understand the "online" plays in their world. (this online/offline topic is my next Tom Sawyer Travel article)
LET’S Wrap THIS Up
If you have made it this far then, gosh, I really appreciate that. This became a long-winded tour of 30+ years of my CX experience. All of these stages I am thankful to have experienced. Thanks as well to all those who have been a part of this journey. Working with you has been a great benefit to me. Together this makes me who I am and guides me onward to what I need to do today. I work with smaller, local businesses and help them "get in tune with the internet". There is a lot to do and the time is now.
