A chief customer officer (CXO) recently confided to us that “I thought building a large organization would make me more powerful. Now I think it just makes me more vulnerable.” Those words haunted me. Why would a CXO regret building a big team?

Collaboration Is The Key To CX Transformation

My colleague Angelina Gennis and I embarked on a mission to find out exactly what high-functioning teams do differently. We studied hundreds of customer experience (CX) case studies across industries, geographies, and company sizes and found a common thread: collaboration.

Successful CXOs accelerate transformation with five distinctive collaboration strategies, either alone or in combination.

  1. Build an insights engine. Partner with data and marketing teams to monitor and act on changing customer behaviors.
  2. Translate CX vision to daily behaviors. Partner with culture and brand teams to embed CX into everyday work on the front line and in the back office.
  3. Break silos with journeys. Partner with teams that cross key customer journeys to deliver win-win outcomes for customers and the organization.
  4. Take action through process improvement. Partner with operations and lean Six Sigma teams to drive customer-centric continuous improvement.
  5. Make it rain with new customers. Partner with sales, strategy, product, and marketing teams to optimize purchase and enrichment journeys.

Five CX Collaboration Strategies

What Collaboration Strategy Is Right For Your CX Transformation?

Consider your organizational strengths as a starting point. They may be mentioned in an earnings call, on your website, or may be part of the informal office chatter.

For instance, if you hear:

  • “Our company runs on data” or “Insights are our competitive advantage,” start with strategy number one: Build an insights engine.
  • “Our people are our company” or “We live our brand values,” start with strategy number two: Translate CX vision to daily behaviors.
  • “We’re on a mission to make life better for our customers” or “We think of our personas as real people,” start with strategy number three: Break silos with journeys.
  • “We’re a product/engineering company” or “We’re process geeks,” start with strategy number four: Take action through process improvement.
  • “Innovation drives our company growth” or “Sales is the holy grail,” start with strategy number five: Make it rain with new customers.

Match Collaboration Strategy to Company Culture

Setting your collaboration strategy in a blog post is a tall order! If you’re a Forrester client, take a look at my new report, which includes 20 case studies (“Leverage Five Collaboration Strategies To Power CX Transformation“), and we can talk further via inquiry. If you have Forrester Forum access, there are on-demand Forum presentations on collaboration strategies available in the CX NA portal. We’ll also be publishing a collaboration strategy assessment later this summer.

CX leaders have the power to pivot their organizations to customer centricity. Start thinking of CX as a team sport, and tap alliances to accelerate your transformation!