Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
Your org chart may make perfect sense inside your organization, but your clients should never have to experience its boundaries. Sometimes the weakness in the client experience is not at any individual touchpoint, but in how the client is handed from one person or department to another.
Today I attended Start Up to Scale Up: The People Strategies Every Growing Business Needs, a panel discussion hosted by the Scalerator® Association of Trinidad & Tobago in partnership with HRMATT. The conversation explored the people, culture and leadership considerations that come with growing a business, but one idea in particular caught my attention.
Desmond Dougall, Co-Founder and Managing Director of GISCAD Limited, said:
Your clients should never feel your org chart.
I was immediately intrigued by the idea.
Every organization needs structure. Different people have different responsibilities, expertise and authority. The person who begins a conversation with a client may not be the person who prepares the invoice, manages delivery, resolves a technical issue or handles the next stage of the relationship. At some point, responsibility has to move from one person to another.
But those changes in responsibility should feel seamless to the client.
There is a difference between being introduced to the next person who will help you and being handed over. One feels like continuity. The other feels like starting again.
You can usually tell when you have crossed an organizational boundary.
Suddenly you are explaining the situation again. The person you are now speaking with knows their part of the process but very little about what happened before it. You hear, “That’s handled by another department.” You are given another name, another email address or another number to call. The organization may see a perfectly reasonable division of responsibilities, but what the client experiences is frustration and fragmentation.
Everyone involved may be doing their job.
The CEO made the introduction. Finance processed the payment. Operations handled delivery. Customer service responded to the query. Each box on the org chart did exactly what the box was supposed to do.
Yet nobody necessarily owned the experience between the org chart boxes.
An internal design decision becomes a client experience.
An org chart is useful because it tells the organization where responsibility sits. But clients do not experience organizations as departments, functions and reporting lines. They experience a relationship with one business.
So when responsibility changes hands internally, the client should experience continuity, not transition.
That might mean the next person already knows who the client is, what has been discussed, what has been promised and why they are now involved. It might mean an introduction that provides context rather than simply passing along contact information. It might mean the person who began the relationship remains visible even though someone else has taken responsibility for the next piece.
The client does not need everyone in the organization to serve them. They need the people who do serve them to feel like a connected whole and not disparate parts.
A handover should be thought of as an internal event, not a customer experience.
The task may move from one person to another, but the client should continue to feel supported by the organization as a whole.
Perhaps one useful way to examine the client experience, then, is not only to map the touchpoints but to look carefully at the spaces between them. Where does responsibility change? What information about the client and their needs is passed on? What doesn’t? Where are they required to repeat themselves? Where might they wonder who is actually looking after them?
Sometimes the weakness in the client experience is not happening at any individual touchpoint. It is happening in the handover between them.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
Where in your organization does responsibility change hands, and what does your client experience at that moment: continuity or a handover?
About Giselle
Some of the most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.
I’m Giselle Hudson, The Pre-Fixer™. I am asked to intervene when something important needs to be better understood before a consequential decision is made.
As The Pre-Fixer™, I act as a strategic thinking partner, working with leaders to examine what they are seeing, separate what they know from what they may be assuming, consider what else might explain the situation, and surface what may not yet be visible.
I don’t fix; I pre-fix. My work happens before the solution is chosen, helping leaders build the understanding from which better decisions can be made.
Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, business and the patterns that shape organizations, following the questions and observations that help us understand situations more clearly before deciding how to respond.
What are you trying to make sense of right now?
