One of the biggest reasons, if not the biggest reason, customer experiences are so bad these days is due to too many business leaders not knowing the game they are playing and thus not having a team aligned and playing together.

To begin, let’s address what we mean by the game businesses are playing. Ultimately and fundamentally, the chief work of business is to create and deliver value. While many would assert that they are there to make money, that thinking is misguided. To make money, you must first provide value, it simply cannot work any other way.

What’s important here? If we think of service as helping people accomplish things, then creating and delivering value is just that. So, service, creating and delivering value that helps people, is the actual game businesses are playing. However, most businesses think of service as part of what they do instead of thinking of it as all of what they do.

The result of this compartmentalizing puts customer care and success in the hands of certain people in a single department or a select few departments. This brings about siloing rather than a unified approach where everyone is linked by a common, fundamental objective. Imagine if an American football team had their players practice separately by position. The quarterbacks would practice by themselves, the running backs by themselves, etc., etc. Think of what it would look like on game day. They’ve all been practicing their skills in a vacuum. How can they possibly come together to play as a team? It would never work, yet companies do it all the time. They have customer-facing employees and back-of-the-house employees and never the twain shall meet. The responsibility for customers falls to a select few rather than everyone. It’s like stitching together a blanket from many different pieces of cloth. This leads to air leaking through the seams and a greater risk of tearing when what is needed is a blanket made from one seamless piece of cloth where everyone in the organization sees service as the function of their work.

To get to this one-piece blanket, leaders must help every employee see how their role contributes to the company helping customers. Every employee must see their connection to creating value and delivering it. This would get every player, the quarterbacks, running backs, and everyone else practicing together and playing as a single unit on game day.

And if the company can get the entire organization to not only create and deliver value as a unified team but also do it in the most hassle-free way possible, just imagine how customers would think and feel about their encounters with the business. They would see everything being centered on their success as well as having their well-being considered all along the way. This is the definition of a great experience.

So, if customer experiences are to truly improve, business leaders must make a shift to see and understand the game they are playing and then align their organizations to it. And CX professionals? They would do well to focus on getting this shift to happen instead of wrapping so much of their energy around maps, methods, and data.

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