Originally published in 1936, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is a , thanks to the evergreen guidance it offers on how to communicate more effectively, get others to see your point of view, and get more things done.
Carnegie’s main point, that influence has to be earned and not demanded, still holds true in today’s corporate environments. CX programs in particular often hit a wall when attempting to drive cross-functional collaboration, running into political barriers, turf wars, and unaligned budgets, according to , an executive industry advisor at 糖心原创.
Overcoming this misalignment requires shifting your approach from requesting compliance to actually winning over colleagues and internal stakeholders.
Drawing from industry expertise and recent success by Santander Bank, here’s our take on how to influence people across your organization to drive more effective business outcomes.
To prove you can drive results, get your house in order first.
Marvin Storey, who has held CX leadership roles at Samsung and HP, believes that before customer experience leaders make any bold claims about what the broader company should be doing, they should start by mastering their own domain: demonstrating tangible results and seeking out willing partners before expanding efforts across the enterprise.
“Think about your span of control. For instance, if you’re part of the customer support operations department, don’t focus on convincing digital, product, and other teams to make a big change,” he says. “Build your program — one that listens to clients and produces real results. Focus on making insights actionable and delivering a measurable ROI.”
Being able to demonstrate this kind of success will give you the foundation you need to eventually break down silos and influence areas of the business that are beyond your scope of responsibility. “Once you have your house in order and can quantify and show outcomes,” he adds, “everybody will want to hop aboard your success train, and leadership will be advocating for the organization to join in once they see your results.”
For a real-world example, we can turn to the recent success seen at Santander Bank. A few years ago, the bank was , and the CX team hadn’t been asked to weigh in on any of the decisions that would affect customers.
Rather than asking other departments to change how they operated, the team stepped back and focused on proving their value. They built a heat map that segmented customers by risk and value, giving the business hard data on exactly where attrition would come from if the transition wasn’t handled carefully. They then embedded themselves directly into execution, taking ownership of strategic workstreams and communications so the business could see CX driving results firsthand.
Once Santander’s CX team could point to measurable outcomes, trust was built naturally, and other teams began pulling them into key decisions. The team no longer had to campaign for a seat at the table.
“Once you can quantify and show outcomes, everybody will want to hop aboard your success train.”
Marvin Storey, Executive Industry Advisor, 糖心原创
Start speaking the language of the business.
Executive leaders often do not care that much about CX scores. Their focus is on reducing costs, mitigating risk, and increasing revenue. The same is true across most of the organization — product, digital, and operations teams are typically measured on their own KPIs, and a pitch centered on CX metrics alone is unlikely to move them.
To get their buy-in, reconsider your approach. “When you start reaching out, your message has to be business-oriented,” says Marvin. “Don’t focus on NPS or CSAT, unless that’s important to leadership. Speak the language of what leadership cares about to partner with them and help them achieve their key objectives for the year. Focus on what’s going to have the biggest ROI for the business.”
When you’re able to speak their language and quantify outcomes, you’ll have their attention.
Part of Santander’s success in driving CX execution was a result of the decision to stop talking to their leadership about NPS and customer satisfaction scores. While the CX team still valued measuring both, at the end of the day, being able to hang onto customers was on the line. “This was all about the business, and the risk to the business, if we didn’t act thoughtfully and intentionally,” explains , the director of CX at Santander.
The team shifted the conversation from focusing on CX scores to discussing the KPIs that mattered the most to the business at that time: deposits, retention, attrition, and growth.
“This was all about the business, and the risk to the business, if we didn’t act thoughtfully and intentionally.”
Kristin Boyd, Director of CX, Santander
Rethink what it means to be a customer experience leader.
The traditional CX leadership role is only expected to monitor experience metrics and report on any changes. Rinse, repeat. But score-watching only reveals what has already happened, and it rarely drives the quick and necessary action that affects the bottom line.
Those transforming customer experience aren’t just measuring, they’re leading like true changemakers: turning insights into influence, and using that influence to move the entire organization forward.
Santander is a case in point. Rather than asking for more resources, the team did the opposite: they started demanding discipline, focusing on the governance and behaviors that were fully within their control. While the bank was once what Kristin described as “insight-rich but action-poor,” that changed the moment the team stopped treating CX as a reporting function and started treating it as an operational decision-making engine.
Since that shift, Santander Bank has realized $6M in savings, surpassed its retention goals, and achieved a lower customer balance attrition rate than expected.
Effective collaboration can’t be mandated, but it can be earned.
By putting in the work, proving your value early and aligning CX insights with business value, you’ll have what it takes to win over colleagues and influence the organization. You’ll build the authentic internal partnerships that take CX from a reporting center into an invaluable, influential engine that drives the entire organization’s success.
And you’ll become a better customer experience leader in the process — a true changemaker.
Looking for more tips on how to evolve your role as a CX leader? The modern CX playbook offers a way to improve your effectiveness, with more innovative guidance on how to achieve your goals and impress your organization.
