Integrating Customer Experience Across Departments

Too often, I’ve been in a meeting where everyone agreed collaboration was essential—yet when it came to execution, things stalled. Silos persisted, friction rose, and progress felt painfully slow. A recent Harvard Business Review article highlights a frustrating truth: even the best-intentioned leaders struggle to work across functions. Why? Because traditional leadership development focuses on vertical leadership (managing teams) rather than lateral leadership (influencing peers across the business). The best cross-functional leaders operate differently. They don’t just lead their teams—they master LATERAL AGILITY: the ability to move side to side, collaborate effectively, and drive results without authority. The article suggests three strategies on how to do this: (1) Think Enterprise-First. Instead of fighting for their department, top leaders prioritize company-wide success. They ask: “What does the business need from our collaboration?” rather than “How does this benefit my team?” (2) Use "Paradoxical Questions" to Avoid Stalemates. Instead of arguing over priorities, they find a way to win together by asking: “How can we achieve my objective AND help you meet yours?” This shifts the conversation from turf battles to solutions. (3) “Make Purple” Instead of Pushing a Plan. One leader in the article put it best: “I bring red, you bring blue, and together we create purple.” The best collaborators don’t show up with a fully baked plan—they co-create with others to build trust and alignment. In my research, I’ve found that curiosity is so helpful in breaking down silos. Leaders who ask more questions—genuinely, not just performatively—build deeper trust, uncover hidden constraints, and unlock creative solutions. - Instead of assuming resistance, ask: “What constraints are you facing?” - Instead of pushing a plan, ask: “How might we build this together?” - Instead of guarding your function’s priorities, ask: “What’s the bigger picture we’re missing?” Great collaboration isn’t about power—it’s about perspective. And the leaders who master it create workplaces where innovation thrives. Which of these strategies resonates with you most? #collaboration #leadership #learning #skills https://lnkd.in/esC4cfjS

One of the biggest challenges in customer experience (CX) initiatives isn't just getting buy-in—it's making sure communication flows seamlessly across different teams to drive meaningful progress. It's not enough to have passionate people involved; it's about aligning everyone around a shared purpose and ensuring that action follows. I see it all the time—CX councils or teams that meet to discuss customer feedback, but the conversation doesn't always translate into real change. It's critical to go beyond just reviewing the numbers. We need to collaborate, co-create, and drive real impact for our customers. So how do we ensure communication within cross-functional teams leads to action? ▶️Structure your meetings to drive progress. If you have cross-functional buy-in, it's essential to manage those meetings effectively. Make sure that everyone understands their role, the goals, and what success looks like. It's not enough to simply review metrics—what are the actions you'll take based on those insights? ▶️Unify efforts across the organization. In many organizations, different teams—like those working on journey mapping and those focused on customer insights—work in silos. We need to bring those efforts together around your customer experience mission, ensuring that all teams are aligned with a shared definition of success. ▶️Be proactive and resourceful. Don't wait for things to fall through the cracks. Be a resource to your team members, follow up, and offer support where needed. This could mean helping a colleague facilitate a journey mapping session or providing customer feedback to help illustrate a challenge. Communication is key, but proactive support is what drives progress forward. When working cross-functionally, the responsibility doesn't end with the meeting. We need to be deliberate about setting expectations, following up on actions, and ensuring everyone understands how their efforts contribute to the larger customer experience mission. Great communication can turn fragmented efforts into unified progress. Let's make sure we're not just talking about customer experience, but working together to make it happen. How do you ensure effective communication across teams in your organization? Drop your process below! #CustomerExperience #CX #CrossFunctionalTeams #Collaboration #Leadership #Communication #CXStrategy #CustomerJourney

You probably have more customer info than ever.⁣ So why can’t your team answer basic questions or make confident decisions?⁣ It’s because data lives in separate systems. Align your tools, insights & the people serving customers.⁣ ⁣ Here’s what that disconnect looks like every day:⁣ ✓ The agent answering the call can’t see the customer’s last chat.⁣ ✓ The supervisor reviewing performance can’t trace a customer issue from beginning to end.⁣ ✓ And service teams are expected to deliver great experiences without knowing what’s already been said or promised.⁣ ⁣ The path forward isn’t more tools.⁣ It’s fewer, smarter ones that are connected and accessible.⁣ ⁣ ❶ Start by mapping one customer journey with your cross-functional teams at the same table (in person if possible).⁣ ⁣ ❷ Identify where handoffs happen, where data gets lost, and where communication breaks — both internally and with the customer.⁣ ⁣ ❸ Then rebuild your systems so the right people have the right context at the right moment — without logging into five platforms or asking the customer to explain again.⁣ ⁣ That’s how you create Emotional Highs™:⁣ Not surface-level satisfaction, but a meaningful emotional lift that makes people stay, return, promote, and forgive when mistakes happen.⁣ ⁣ Loyalty isn’t driven by your tech stack.⁣ It comes from how people FEEL when every interaction is easy, efficient, and clearly built around their needs.⁣ Yes — feel. As in emotions. The thing that’s always driven buying decisions, even if companies pretend otherwise.⁣ ⁣ This isn’t a tech upgrade.⁣ It’s experience transformation.⁣ And it’s how you compete and win in today’s market.⁣ ⁣ Are YOU #DoingCXRight®?⁣ Need help with ❶ ❷❸ above? Message me. ⁣ 👉 Share + comment if you found this helpful so others can benefit.⁣ ⁣ #CX #TheFormula #Nextiva #CustomerExperience #CustomerService⁣

👥 Are our customers a name and a logo, or a real person trying to help themselves and their companies win each day? Let’s be honest: CS doesn’t always get this right. I don’t always get this right. When things get tough (aka churn risk, low usage, budget pressure) our instinct is to reach for the metrics. What can we quantify? What can we prove? How do we show we’re “doing our job”? We start building dashboards, framing health scores, chasing outcomes. Not wrong But also not enough. Because often, metrics make us feel better internally. But they don't us understand the people we’re here to serve. This is the tension at the heart of CS. We sit between the customer’s lived reality and the company’s operational pressure. And it’s our job to resolve that tension. Not avoid it. Not outsource it. Own it. So here’s what I’m thinking about today: What can we do to drive a deeper understanding across our orgs of client needs and value? And more importantly: How do we humanize the people at those clients? Here are 5 small moves with outsized impact: 1️⃣ Tell customer stories, not just stats. Share a 30-second anecdote at an All Hands Meeting. Real people. Real outcomes. 2️⃣ Bring a voice into the room. Quote an actual user in a roadmap meeting. Let them shape the build. 3️⃣ Translate feedback into intent. Don’t just say what a client asked for. Explain why it matters. 4️⃣ Invite cross-functional teammates to customer calls. Let them hear the tone, nuance, and urgency directly. 5️⃣ Celebrate wins that start with the customer. When a feature lands or a renewal closes, connect it to the human story behind it. CS isn’t just about adoption or retention. It’s about being the customer people engine inside the business. And that starts with us, every day, choosing to fight for understanding, not just validation. #CustomerSuccess #Leadership #VoiceOfCustomer #CustomerCentricity #CreateTheFuture

Over the years, I've discovered the truth: Game-changing products won't succeed unless they have a unified vision across sales, marketing, and product teams. When these key functions pull in different directions, it's a death knell for go-to-market execution. Without alignment on positioning and buyer messaging, we fail to communicate value and create disjointed experiences. So, how do I foster collaboration across these functions? 1) Set shared goals and incentivize unity towards that North Star metric, be it revenue, activations, or retention. 2) Encourage team members to work closely together, building empathy rather than skepticism of other groups' intentions and contributions. 3) Regularly conduct cross-functional roadmapping sessions to cascade priorities across departments and highlight dependencies. 4) Create an environment where teams can constructively debate assumptions and strategies without politics or blame. 5) Provide clarity for sales on target personas and value propositions to equip them for deal conversations. 6) Involve all functions early in establishing positioning and messaging frameworks. Co-create when possible. By rallying together around customers’ needs, we block and tackle as one team towards product-market fit. The magic truly happens when teams unite towards a shared mission to delight users!

Let’s be honest, the “Listen, Analyze, Act” model just isn’t enough anymore. CX teams need to move faster, focus sharper, and deliver results everyone in the business can see. That means making outcomes core to your approach, and making sure you energize the entire organization around what matters. How do you deliver on “Outcomes > Action” as the new mantra over “Listen—> Analyze —> Act?” First, unify your data. Easier said than done, but you have to pull together every signal from surveys, tickets, chats, ops data, and social feedback. Use AI to create a real-time, connected customer view, so you’re not just looking at snapshots, but seeing the bigger story as it unfolds. Second, interpret what you find. AI can surface intent, risk, and opportunity in ways traditional methods miss. Zero in on what actually drives the experience and impacts the business. This is where you separate noise from the signals that count. You should also be thinking about how this impacts revenue, cost-to-serve, and your company’s culture (not just customers). Third, orchestrate targeted action. AI can help you prioritize and automate interventions, whether that’s routing cases, suggesting next-best actions (or product), or personalizing experiences at scale. Every action should have a clear line of sight to the business outcome you’re after. Measurable. Fourth, focus on the outcome. Set non-negotiable, measurable goals: revenue, retention, cost to serve, or employee engagement. Every initiative, every improvement, should be traced back to these metrics. Celebrate when you move the needle and be honest about what didn’t work. Finally, energize the business. Change only sticks when you bring others with you. CX leaders have to rally stakeholders, share early wins, and make progress visible. This is about building belief and momentum so everyone feels ownership of the results. How does this look in real life? Imagine that renewal rates among small business customers are falling. You unify data across channels and use AI to interpret that a recent product change is causing confusion. You orchestrate a fix by launching in-app tutorials or targeted outreach, and equip the frontlines with talking points. You measure the outcome by tracking renewal rates, then energize the business by celebrating the improvement, sharing the story, and holding teams accountable for continued results. Listening, Analyzing, and Acting are important. But the framework is what, 15 years old or more at this point? It needs to evolve given businesses, technology, and customers have evolved. Don’t keep following the same old script. Challenge the status quo. Action with purpose, a business energized around outcomes, and AI as the catalyst for lasting impact is the start. #customerexperience #leadership #ai #changemanagement #outcomesoveraction

#CustomerExperience leaders need to split their strategies into deliberate bottom-up and top-down approaches. Many get the bottom-up right, but they struggle with the top-down. Bottom-up strategies focus on improving customer-centric employee behaviors at scale. These approaches include #CX or empathy training for front-line workers, using Voice of Customer feedback to set touchpoint expectations based on customer feedback, and building customer-centric KPIs into individual performance appraisals. But where many CX leaders struggle is often with engaging senior leaders to influence their customer-centric behaviors. It's difficult to influence C-suite behavior, but if you're expected to improve customer-centric culture in the organization, then you cannot avoid this. Top-down strategies start with showing senior leaders how customer satisfaction impacts growth, retention, margin, and lifetime value. It also includes improving CX and VoC reporting to provide more recommendations and actions, not just findings and data. Having discussions with leaders about the importance of financial and non-financial rewards for customer-centric behaviors is another tool in the top-down toolkit. And using personas and journey maps is a vital way to convert customer and touchpoint data into a compelling story of necessary change. Don't rely on dashboards and reports to do the job of top-down CX engagement. Don't count on a couple of positive customer-centric comments from leaders as a sign of meaningful, irreversible support. And do not assume that the fact your CX job exists is evidence of senior leaders' commitment to customer experience. Part of the job for a successful CX leader is to constantly prove the value of customer-centric strategies, influence senior leader priorities, and arm decision-makers with the insight they need to make customer-centric decisions. Don't just empower your frontline workers and assume the job is done. If you aren't building a consistent dialog with executives, you're not only missing an opportunity to make the most significant customer impact but also seeding future problems that can lead to declining support, budget, and resources for customer experience initiatives. Take a comment today to identify or define your top-down and bottom-up CX strategies for 2024. If there's an imbalance, solving that now can lead to better outcomes by the end of this year.

Your sales team is sprinting. Your marketing team is in a planning cycle. And customer success is in post-sale chaos mode. And somehow, you’re supposed to align all three with “Monday meetings”? GTM doesn’t fail because of bad execution. It fails because no one’s marching to the same beat. Here’s what most orgs get wrong: They treat sales, marketing, and CS like adjacent departments When they actually function like dependent systems. If your sales team learns something in the field and it doesn’t make it into your campaign logic, Your marketing is out of touch. If your CS team sees churn red flags, But your sales team keeps closing misfit accounts. Your pipeline is broken from the inside. You can’t “align” that with a slide deck. Here’s a tactical breakdown of what actually works: 1. Unify Goals > Mirror Metrics If your teams don’t share KPIs, they’ll compete instead of collaborate. - Marketing: MQL to Opportunity Ratio - Sales: Opportunity to Closed-Won - CS: Expansion/Churn tied back to original acquisition source Build a shared scorecard that forces accountability across the funnel. 2. Centralize GTM Ops Ownership Someone needs to be accountable for the operating rhythm itself. That’s where Marketing Ops and RevOps step in. Own the cadence Track system health Identify feedback loops Flag GTM friction before it hits revenue 3. Run GTM Like a Product Create a backlog of GTM experiments → Funnel friction → Content gaps → Win/loss insights → Tool bloat or confusion Sprint. Measure. Ship. Repeat. No one gets to "opt out" of the rhythm just because they're customer-facing or campaign-led. Stop aligning through meetings and start aligning through systems. The rhythm is the strategy. If you can't hear it— You're not really in market. #GTMStrategy #MarketingOps #RevOps #Leadership #CustomerExperience #OperationalExcellence

The fatal flaw killing most go-to-market strategies (and no, it’s not pricing)... Being a CRO was the best thing I could’ve done for my career, not just for understanding sales, but for seeing how broken the relationship between sales and marketing can be. Most companies still treat them as separate functions, sometimes even rival camps. But if you’ve ever actually carried a revenue number, you know: Sales needs to embed within marketing. Not “collaborate with.” Not “align with.” Embed. 👉 Companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve 208% higher marketing revenue than those without it. 👉 And yet, 90% of B2B buyers say their purchase journey is disjointed... the result of siloed messaging and poor handoffs. Why? Because in too many orgs, sales is flying blind on what marketing is producing, while marketing doesn’t hear what’s happening in the field. But the best sales orgs are shaping demand, reading the market in real time, and feeding that signal back into messaging, creative, targeting, and even product. They're not sitting around waiting for leads. The loop between sales and marketing should be tight. Sales should know what campaigns are going out next week, and marketing should know what objections are coming up on calls today. When I was CRO, I sat inside the marketing team. Listened to campaign planning. Reviewed creative briefs. Gave direct feedback on what the sales floor was actually hearing. It made a difference. That experience forever changed how I think about building go-to-market teams. It’s not about “alignment.” It’s about complete integration.

I recently worked with a product team struggling with an app that had great #UI and front end #UX — but absolutely horrible ratings and reviews from customers. The product itself was very well-designed, but these people were NOT happy. No one could figure out why—until I started pushing them to poke their noses into other areas of the business. Looking in places they weren’t familiar with. Asking questions no one expected (and in some cases wanted) them to ask. I worked with them over several weeks to map the entire service delivery process, from beginning to end, across multiple departments, systems and processes. We found that back-end processes were badly misaligned with the front-end user experience in a number of ways: The app promised fast delivery, but the company’s warehouse system didn’t sync in real-time with inventory. Users were buying items that were actually out of stock, leading to delayed or canceled orders. The payment processor didn’t always confirm transactions immediately, leading to both duplicate charges and orders cancelled in frustration. The customer support team had no visibility into payment issues, frustrating users who called for help. The estimated delivery dates displayed in the app were based on ideal conditions, but logistics teams weren’t updating them when delays happened. Users would place an order expecting next-day delivery, only to receive an updated ETA days later, ultimately causing order cancellation. Finding and fixing those issues transformed the experience — and made the business folks very happy. Instead of just improving the UI or adding more information or error messages, the product team made fundamental service design fixes based on what we learned together: 1) Real-time inventory sync. They integrated warehouse stock levels directly into the app, so only available items could be purchased. If stock ran low, the app would show an accurate ETA before checkout, preventing surprise delays. 2) Making payment processes transparent — to everyone. They improved payment processing speeds and added better failure detection, preventing double charges. Customer service was given real-time access to transaction history, so they could immediately resolve billing issues. 3) Live delivery tracking (and better estimates). The company integrated real-time logistics updates, so delivery ETAs would automatically update based on warehouse and carrier status. Instead of false promises, users saw realistic delivery windows — before purchasing. After these holistic, end-to-end service design fixes, the company saw: - 35% fewer customer complaints about late deliveries and missing orders.
 - 60% fewer refund requests related to duplicate charges.
 - The average app rating improved from 2.8 to 4.3 stars within three months. The #ProductDesign and UX of the app itself was never the problem. It was the invisible, broken service layers that made it feel terrible to use.