One plus one is more than two – partnering and collaboration can mean a huge difference in many kinds of efforts. Listening to customers often reveals, how the lack of collaboration across organizational silos impact customer experience. Marketing perhaps made promises that a product was never designed to deliver, or the company collected insights that never reached the right teams to enable CX improvements, or resources were not allocated with CX development in mind.
Today I want to write about one specific area of company internal collaboration, namely collaboration between people responsible for CX and Finance and Control.
When this topic comes up, people often look like they never thought about it before. It may even sound scary that CX practices should align with Finance and Control. There is, however, a lot of benefit e.g. in bringing the customer insights to the company leaders along with financial information.
In practice this means that the status and results of CX metrics need to be reported with the same discipline and regularity as financial metrics and other company key performance indicators. When CX measures follow the same monitoring practices as financial metrics, they really start making a difference.
What can CX people then learn from F&C? For example, routines in reporting metrics and insights to company leaders:
- Where: What are the forums, e.g leadership team meetings, where financial metrics are monitored. The same forums should be – and usually are – interested in the state of customer feedback.
- What format: It is usually easiest to approach receivers of information with the same formats that they are used to. When customer metrics are reported to leadership teams, integrating them into the same dashboards or scorecards as financial metrics is usually very powerful.
- When: What are the schedules of F&C reporting? F&C reporting follows a very strict timetable, and CX gains a lot of credibility by being able to deliver accordingly.
- Who coordinates it all: Usually the F&C organization pulls together all information about a company’s key performance indicators. It is probable that the first step for CX people is to train the F&C contacts about customer measures – and show them examples of the economic benefit of investing in CX. F&C can also help CX build business cases to support customer focused transformation programs.
Collaboration between CX and F&C is very powerful for getting leaders’ attention. There are, however, other organizations, which CX people should also work with. More posts on company internal CX collaboration are coming.
