Chapter 3: Center around your ecosystem.
Bring your teams together to foster a collaborative culture.
Who owns the partner and customer experience? Everyone in your company. That means collaboration and empowerment must be your top priority. When a partner or customer calls, they speak to the first person they get. They see your company as one entity — and don’t care which department the person is from. They shouldn’t have to navigate your org chart to get the answers they need — but this happens all too often. The only way to drive meaningful change is to connect silos and act as a unified team so employees closest to partners and customers create enduring relationships. Partner and customer-centric manufacturers develop a culture around the entire ecosystem. They equip distinct departments to share, collaborate, and deliver integrated experiences — down to the most junior employees — and overlay tools and information that everyone needs in service of the customer.
Get started: Bring your teams together.
Foster a collaborative culture that celebrates success as a broader team. Encourage teams to share goals and KPIs and identify opportunities to help each other — even with those who don’t normally work together. Success lies in moving away from a traditionally department-specific approach. Listen to all perspectives, especially from those who are on the front lines with customers and partners, such as account managers and service teams. Who is responsible for designing the end-to-end experience and where are the bottlenecks?
Move From...
- Departmental specialization
- Metrics determined by department
- Rigid, hierarchical org structures
- Serving shareholders
- Culture of information as power
To...
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Shared success metrics
- Flatter, flexible team structures
- Mobilized ecosystem of stakeholders
- Culture of information transparency across the ecosystem
Next: Chapter 4: Make an immediate impact with agile and scalable solutions.
Build an ever-deeper view of your partner or customer by segmenting them and identifying new opportunities.
- Empower business with a single source of truth
