“As an agency, we often insist that we work across departments because we recognise the limits in working with marketing alone. The experiences we’re looking to create often need someone from sales or product design involved.
You do have to make someone responsible for this or it gets swallowed by departmental differences and I think that does naturally sit within marketing, but where I’ve seen it fail is when marketing tries to lead while also doing the day job. There is a reality to how much someone is able to handle, especially if they’re not measured on improving CX.
Depending on the size of the client, we typically set up a council that would be responsible for steering the work that’s in play, usually that’s chaired by a marketing person. It can be very effective.”
Stay agile for quick wins
“Small teams working in parallel to the organisation helps, especially where they are there to resolve a specific challenge and then bring it back into the organisation. Speak to all of the stakeholders, establish the top three problems, starting first from the customer’s perspective. Determine what might be manageable within a small project – such as a change in your technology or small- scale change in process. Pair up with someone, for example on product development or customer relations. Take something small, make changes, show it to the business and customers, validate it and then scale.
It’s a mammoth task to transform an organisation’s CX, sometimes impossible unless you break it down into manageable components. The fear is that it will deliver a schizophrenic output, so it’s key to put the right governance in place to ensure that what you set out to do is still front of mind on day 382.”
When Mirum pitches for work it presents these principles as essential for the project’s success:
1. Get stakeholders involved early
It’s important to get stakeholders involved early so they feel they’re genuinely contributing. If people don’t feel they’ve contributed they can react negatively, regardless of how good the work is.
2. Bring your different stakeholders in at the right time
This work often involves senior decision-makers so it’s easy to forget the frontline people, like those who have to add the content to the website. Don’t forget the doers and expose the right levels of stakeholders at the right time.
3. Respect the past
Go through a detailed discovery phase, find out everything that’s wrong and then present those findings back – but be careful how. It can feel like a slap round the face for people who have been working through it for a long time. Temper your findings with ambition but also respect of what’s already been done to get there.
Workshop Idea: Resolving the customer pain points
- Map the customer pain points across their lifecycle.
- Create a relatable narrative for each customer challenge.
- Share these narratives across the business.
- Ask each department to assess how they could improve this issue, and what they would need from other departments.
- Join together as a business (or cross-functional team) to discuss ideas and how to unite on the delivery.
