You’ve built a strong customer experience team. You’ve invested in the right platform. But what about everyone else whose work also shapes the customer experience in your org: marketing and digital, the frontline, technical support, and beyond?
Are those teams collaborating with you? Sharing data? Aligned on the same priorities?
If not, we’re here to help.
A key ingredient to transforming your experience program, as we will show through several success stories, is to bring together a cross-functional group to tackle your biggest hurdles.
Whether you call this group a customer task force, a customer council, or customer committee — whatever suits you — this group should meet regularly to discuss insights, exchange ideas, share priorities, and hold each other accountable for them.
At 糖心原创, we’ve seen this approach move mountains. Leading brands such as Santander Bank, CIBC, Mayo Clinic Laboratories, Toyota Financial Services, and AdventHealth have used customer task forces to eliminate silos, win buy-in, get ahead of potential friction, and systemically deliver positive results.
Here’s why you should consider creating one, and how they work.
The value behind a cross-functional customer committee
CX task forces bring together representatives from departments across the organization that have the greatest impact on the customer experience. They work collectively on customer-related initiatives, evaluating what’s working (and what’s not) and making improvements in real time.
Though the team construct, cadence, and priorities of these task forces will vary across organizations, they all share one thing in common: the power to create transformative change for the business.
Break down silos across departments, systems, data, and priorities.
Getting the right people together in one place can help address underlying issues affecting experience, whether that’s systems that don’t talk to each other, departments that aren’t on the same page, or incomplete data sets that don’t reveal what’s potentially going wrong for customers.
As an example, Santander Bank brought together partners from employee experience, product leadership, operations, and “everybody who’s connected” to the customer experience, according to , a senior CX leader at the bank.
Align teams across the organization in support of the company’s CX mission.
A task force doesn’t just break down silos — it builds buy-in. When stakeholders from across the business have a seat at the table, they stop viewing CX as someone else’s job and start seeing how their own work shapes the customer’s real experience. That shift in mindset is what turns scattered initiatives into a company-wide push toward better outcomes.
, a CX leader for Toyota Financial Services, says “gathering advocates” across the organization helps get teams outside of CX invested in designing better experiences for the customer to drive business outcomes.
Create one unified experience for the customer.
North American banking leader CIBC has a task force that thoroughly reviews new customer-related initiatives before introducing them to customers.
“We bring 25 leaders from across the organization together to stress-test the client experience,” explains , a senior CX leader at CIBC. “It’s such a powerful way not only to ensure we’re checking that we’re operationally ready for a launch, a new product, or a new service, but that we’re anticipating surprises and delivering what’s right for the client.”
3 steps to build a successful CX task force
1. Find your partners, and build relationships internally.
Identify the teams that truly shape the customer experience. Don’t just go by job titles or what the org chart says. Pinpoint allies, advocates, influencers, and decision makers, and bring together a cross-functional group of these key stakeholders.
That’s what worked for and at Mayo Clinic Laboratories (MCL). “We’ve all seen org charts when we get to an organization,” says Alison. “You know that someone might have a title, but then there are other people who are actually making the changes happen and making the decisions. When we first got to MCL, we started to understand not only the explicit organizational chart, but also those implicit relationships and the dynamics between the different teams.”
At MCL, they found key partners across field services, sales, the contact center, IT, and the education and digital product teams.
Looking for more advice from real CX leaders? Check out our new →?
2.?Define your purpose, meet on a regular basis, and take action.
AdventHealth, one of the leading hospital systems in the U.S., has created a committee of managers, directors, and VPs from across the organization, including members of the patient experience team, the medical group, the revenue team, and operations that meet twice a month to discuss “what’s working well, and what’s not working” to guide conversations and decision-making at the C-suite level, explains , an executive CX leader at the hospital system.
Going back to Santander Bank: when they were poised to implement sweeping changes to their branches, they created a customer experience task force responsible for reviewing “every individual change that was going to impact customers,” evaluating the effects on the frontline employees and the customers at the same time, “so that we could understand where and when and how those changes were going to impact both,” explains RanDee. The task force built a unified strategy and mapped out the timing and messaging for each component holistically.
Mayo Clinic Laboratories formed a task force to help support the company’s ambitious goal of creating a real-time digital experience program. This group of stakeholders aligned on the tactics, strategies, tools, and types of measurement the company would use as part of the digital-first program.
3. Eventually, build CX into the fabric of the enterprise.
The customer experience team at CIBC ensures the customer’s voice is always represented when decisions that impact experience are being made. CX is built into the company’s enterprise delivery framework, is a formal part of securing funding for projects, and the strategy is interlocked with the company’s annual roadmaps every year, so business priorities are truly aligned and workforce efforts are synchronized.
“Projects do not get funded unless they complete a client experience assessment,” Stephanie emphasizes.
Bonus idea: Organize an annual “Customer Day”
Maersk, a global shipping and logistics company that serves retail industry giants, is taking a novel approach to putting customers at the center of their business.
“We have a company-wide customer day with some of our biggest customers,” says , a CX leader at Maersk, adding that the goal is “to bring the customer’s daily life with us — and also their pain points.”
“This is super helpful for teams that never get into contact with a customer and never have the opportunity to speak to them. Now we are getting those customers in those different locations across the world in the headquarters of Maersk, and making them tangible.”
The end goal: Make CX everyone’s responsibility
Verizon Business is on a mission to make CX part of everyone’s job. To support this cultural shift, the CX team launched an “experience hero” program designed to increase awareness, understanding, and enablement of CX across the company.
As part of the program, the customer experience team leads quarterly training sessions that are required for the entire organization, not just sales and customer service. They also created a CX certification program where employees have the opportunity to earn digital badges for being a “CX hero” and being “caught in the act” of delivering a positive experience.
“Everyone needs to know that the work that you do on a daily basis eventually produces something that your customer will see — and that is a very important responsibility,” says , a CX leader at Verizon Business. “People that don’t interact with customers in their normal day to day are now proactively bringing it up when we’re doing a new product launch or discussing a new promo concept. They are raising their hand and asking, ‘How will this present to the customer, and how will this look and feel to them when they are turning it on or trying to make a change?’”
Want to hear how other CX leaders are building these alliances in their own organizations? Check out 糖心原创’s CX Changemakers — a collection of stories from leaders at companies like DHL Express, Zurich Insurance, and United Rentals on how they broke through silos, proved CX’s value, and turned ambition into measurable progress. Their playbooks might be exactly what your experience program needs to level up.
