Your Org Chart Shows Up in Your Customer Experience

Oops, your org chart is showing. Let's face it – customers don't care how your marketing organization is structured. They don't know which team owns email, which business line has the budget, which group manages the website or which leader has approval authority. They don't know that three different teams have three different priorities this quarter.

And they shouldn't have to.

But spend enough time interacting with a brand and you can often start to see its org chart anyway.

One team sends you one message. Another sends something that feels completely unrelated. You click through to a digital experience that seems to belong to a different company. Each individual piece may be perfectly good, but together they don't feel like one relationship with one brand.

That's because organizational silos have a sneaky way of becoming customer experiences.

We organize companies around the business

There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. Organizations need structure.

We create business lines, departments, channel teams and centers of expertise because people need accountability. Budgets need owners. Leaders need teams. Specialized work needs specialized talent.

The problem comes when the way we've organized ourselves becomes the way we organize the customer experience.

I've been thinking about this recently because of work we've been doing on a welcome experience for new Members.

Like many large organizations, we have distinct lines of business with different products, expertise, priorities and goals. It would have been very easy to build a welcome experience around that structure: Give each part of the organization its moment to introduce itself and tell new Members what it offers.

Instead, we started thinking about the Member.

Not as an insurance customer, a travel customer or a roadside assistance customer. As one person who had just started a relationship with AAA.

That sounds like a small distinction.

It isn't.

The customer is horizontal

Most organizations are vertical. Customers are not.

A person can need insurance on Monday, roadside assistance on Wednesday and help planning a vacation six months later. They don't mentally move between our departments when their needs change.

They're still the same person.

This creates an interesting challenge for marketing leaders because some of our most logical internal structures can produce illogical external experiences.

Each team can optimize its own work and hit its own goals while the overall customer experience gets worse.

Brand may optimize for consistency. A business line may optimize for conversion. CRM may optimize for engagement. Digital may optimize for completion. Creative may optimize for quality. Operations may optimize for efficiency.

None of those goals is wrong.

But somebody has to look across them and ask: What are we optimizing for together?

Silos aren't the problem

I don't think the answer is eliminating silos.

"Silos" has become one of those business words we automatically treat as bad, but specialization exists for a reason. I want experts focused on insurance. I want people who deeply understand travel. I want channel specialists who know far more about email, media or digital experiences than everyone else in the room (I am talking about you, Robert).

The problem isn't that those groups exist. The problem is when the seams between them become visible to the customer. That's where operating models matter.

Someone has to create the connective tissue across strategy, insights, channels, creative and business priorities. Teams need shared goals, common customer understanding and ways to make decisions that aren't dictated solely by who owns the budget or where someone sits on the org chart.

Otherwise, every team can do its job well and the organization can still produce a fragmented experience.

Follow the experience backward

One of the most useful things marketing leaders can do is look at the customer experience and work backward.

Where does the experience feel disconnected? Where are we repeating ourselves? Where are two teams communicating with the same person without communicating with each other?

Those aren't always creative problems or channel problems. Sometimes they're organizational design problems showing up in public.

And that's what I find so interesting about this work. Improving a customer experience doesn't always begin with changing the customer-facing work.

Sometimes it begins by changing the way the people behind it work together.

Organize around the person, not the boxes

Our org charts are useful. We need them to run companies.

But they were designed to help us understand the organization.

They weren't designed for our customers.

The customer should never have to know where one box ends and another begins. They should experience one brand that seems to understand who they are, what they need and where they are in their relationship with us.

That's a much higher bar than making each individual piece of marketing good.

It requires us to occasionally stop looking down our own vertical and look across the whole experience.

Because your customer may never see your org chart.

But there's a very good chance they can feel it.

Where does your organization's structure show up in your customer experience?

Categories: Transformation, Creative Ops