Organisational Design is the Next Step in CX
Key Takeaways
Good CX needs good infrastructure. Clear processes, standards, SOPs and escalation pathways make it easier for people to deliver consistently.
Your CX problem might actually be a structure problem. Slow onboarding, poor conversion and customer churn can all point to deeper organisational issues.
Growth changes what your organisation needs. The systems and processes that worked when you were small won't necessarily work as you scale.
Customer journeys can expose organisational cracks. Friction often appears where teams, systems and responsibilities meet.
Someone needs to connect the dots. Customer journey management helps teams stay aligned around the experience they're collectively responsible for.
Strategy means nothing if it can't reach the frontline. A five-year plan in a slide deck won't change much if people don't know what it means for their day-to-day work.
Your frontline knows more than you think. The people closest to customers often have the clearest view of what's actually working and what isn't.
Design the organisation, not just the experience. CX shows you where things are breaking down. Organisational design helps you fix what's underneath.
The goal isn't just a better customer journey. It's an organisation that is built to deliver one.
How we talk about and position CX design is no longer fit for purpose. Customer experience has always been a way to shift how organisations work, and what they perceive as normal, possible and desirable.
However, understanding the customer and improving their experience is only the starting point. What we really want is for organisations to structure their systems and standards around the customer's aspirations. This is how we build better organisations that become more responsive and focus on what matters most to the people who pay them: the customer.
Organisational design isn’t a replacement for CX. Quite the opposite. While customer experience helps us understand what matters, organisational design helps us build the capability to deliver on it consistently.
CX tells us where an experience is breaking down. Organisational design is the operational response. In service of the ambition your organisation has set.
Signs it’s not a CX problem; it’s a structure problem.
Often when an organisation starts working with us, it’s because they are experiencing a customer-related problem. Perhaps conversion targets aren’t being met, onboarding is taking too long, or customers are leaving quickly.
But what quickly surfaces are that the issue is not just customer experience. That is only a symptom. The root cause is usually structural.
As businesses grow, their operations generally don’t scale or mature at the same speed. People pick up the slack the systems and processes can’t hold, with a lot of hard work and elbow grease. But at some point, a business moves from driving growth to sustaining market position.
If onboarding has suddenly become a major pain point, or if you are starting to lose customers and do not know why, then that is not just an acquisition problem. It is an infrastructure problem and a sign you have outgrown your current business infrastructure.
The fix often sits there, but finding exactly what needs to be done, shows up first in the customer experience.
Retention, churn and customer lifetime value
I’m often asked: How do I get more customers, and how do I stop losing them? My short answer is: Know who your customers are, why they chose you and why they decide to stay.
When sales slow, your first instinct is to do more. Ask more of your marketing and sales and service teams. But when it comes to deciding why this is happening and which part of the business is responsible, everyone has different answers. Because each department holds a mandate for a different part of the customer journey. But no one owns it end-to-end or tracks what happens when a customer gets handed from one department to another, where we generally see a lot of missed opportunities.
Every touchpoint that creates value for a customer can also create friction. If your processes are messy, nothing is standardised, or people are working towards different goals, then the link between what your organisation is trying to achieve, and the day-to-day work is missing.
Customer journeys are an amazing tool to create visibility, decision clarity and a mandate for meaningful collaboration. And importantly, empower your people to do their best work, not make up for failing organisational systems.
One question I often have for organisations is: Who is responsible for the end-to-end journey? Often a variation of a Journey Manager or Experience Owner role, this needs to be someone who can ensure the different departments understand interdependencies of their work to other parts of the journey (and the business) and are working towards the same goals. If you don’t have journey management in your setup, people will generally default to their individual silos.
Getting strategy from the boardroom to the front line
Leadership teams and Boards often spend two days at a strategic retreat and return with a five-year business strategy.
It gets put into a beautiful deck, and a memo goes out to the staff. Meanwhile, the people on the front line either don’t care or don’t know how to execute it, because it doesn’t directly relate to what they are responsible for.
When we make decisions about systems, strategies, and goals for the business, those decisions are often reserved for executive suites and boardrooms. But what would happen if we leveraged the smarts, ideas, and experiences of our people to make more informed decisions?
One of the best ways to do this is to stay close to the front line and close that gap. For example, one organisation mandated that its leaders spend one day a month in the contact centre or with technicians on the ground. This trial was so successful it was added as a KPI in senior leaders’ job descriptions, and their bonuses were tied to it.
Customer experience is not about doing what your customers want. It’s about creating an intentional experience based on what you know they need. And you can’t do that if you rely on industry trend reports or gut feel to make your decisions. We are rarely our own customers.
Customer journeys and experiences rely on systems, standards, and structures to work well. If your organisation doesn’t have SOPs, clarity of vision or communications to define ‘good’, and mechanisms that create working cultures that deliver to those standards, your decisions and investments have no chance of paying off.
Understanding your customer experience is the starting point. The goal is to design an organisation that functions as one connected system to enable that experience.
If this is you, book a call today to learn how we can help with Customer Journey Maps & Service Blueprints.
