Your CX is only as good as your organization is fluid

Nov 3 / Hanna Mileva
We’ve built our organizations into perfect, efficient kingdoms. The marketing department has its castle. The product team has its fortress. The web team guards its own gate. Everyone is successfully hitting their internal metrics, yet the customer is lost in the wilderness between them.

They are trying to complete a single journey, but we force them to cross our hostile borders at every turn. We obsess over optimizing the individual channels while failing to see that the real problem is the connective tissue.

A great customer experience isn't about better silos; it's about the organizational fluidity to tear them down.
Old processes and technologies can keep established organizations from creating exceptional customer experiences and achieving future growth. Good customer experience demands organizational fluidity.

In today’s digital world, customers often interact with an organization multiple times to achieve a single goal. These related interactions make up the customer journey. Many customers take an omnichannel approach to complete their goals: they interact with the organization multiple times, using various channels (phone, web, mail, email, text, etc.). The overall experience on all these channels makes up the omnichannel customer experience.

For the broader dimensions of customer experience, the journey and the relationship level, there are five components that impact the quality of these experiences:
  • Consistent: Providing a consistent, cohesive, and familiar experience across all channels.
  • Optimized: Creating individual channel experiences that are best suited for that channel’s constraints and contexts of use.
  • Seamless: Making channel transitions as effortless as possible and helping customers pick up where they left off when they switch from one channel to another during a task.
  • Orchestrated: Proactively leading customers through their individual journeys with the right personalized interactions and messages at the right time.
  • Collaborative (optional): Enriching the customer journey by allowing customers to take advantage of multiple channels at the same time to improve the overall user experience.


These experience components are listed in order for a reason. The first two components (consistent, optimized) are the most easily controlled because the scope of any organizational changes to address them is fairly targeted. However, the higher-level components, seamless and orchestrated, are not as easy to achieve because they require a larger scope of organizational changes.

More Organizational Transformations Needed for a Good Longitudinal CX

Most of the time, before making any changes to improve the customer journey, we must address three types of organizational dependencies and constraints:
  • Process and Structure. In many cases, a CX opportunity we identified requires not only a change in the customer-facing experience but a change in the things we do internally to support it.
  • People. Most of the time, to implement any CX change, we must get buy-in from other stakeholders. Getting others on board is always a huge dependency.
  • Technology. Sometimes, the customer-facing change we need can’t be addressed without making a technical infrastructure change to support it.


In a lot of ways, your organization’s customer experience is only as good as its ability to change. If you can’t support change in the dependencies, then they become a constraint holding you back, and those customer-facing experience improvements won’t be correctly addressed. This holds true at every level of CX. However, the larger the scope of the experience, the more and harder-to-address the dependencies become.

Fixing Omnichannel Experiences Means Addressing Internal Organizational Dependencies

Consider a travel company that promotes sales and deals on Facebook. Customers see specific travel deals but are frustrated when they click the promotions only to be dropped on a general-sale page with hundreds of other deals. They expect to see the single deal that they clicked on and they struggle to filter through all the offerings on the Sales page.

This issue is a failure in the seamlessness of the customer journey. The appropriate solution would be to drive customers to a landing page dedicated to the exact travel deal advertised. This change would be significant, as it impacts several areas of the organization, including the marketing department and the web-product team. It also has a large technical impact. Hundreds of additional landing pages would be needed to receive traffic from each unique promotion. The solution would require various levels of leadership approval and significant resource investments to address.

In this case, the lack of seamlessness in the transition from the Facebook page to the website is just one issue. The root problem is the company’s outdated working structure and processes. Its marketing functions and web-product teams work in silos, without coordination. This lack of organizational fluidity is the real barrier to a good customer experience.

To deliver a truly seamless, orchestrated, and collaborative customer experience, organizations must be fluid. They must be able to adapt their processes, structures, and technologies to meet the evolving needs of their customers. This is not easy, but it is essential for survival in today’s competitive landscape.