How do you get your company to be in agreement about the customer experience? What are the things that need to be aligned with team members when delivering customer success?
Jeff Geiger, President of Success Performance Solutions, is a speaker and consultant with over 20 years of experience in coaching leaders through challenging change. Jeff’s leadership includes guiding organizations through digital transformation, enabling them to increase revenue while serving their customers with excellence. He has worked in all environments from startup to Fortune 50 companies including brands like Cisco Systems, Dell Inc., IBM Global Services, Hallmark Cards Canada and Time Warner Cable.
Power of team alignment
The power of team alignment is the ability to accomplish your goals by leveraging the strengths, talents, skills and experiences of those around you. By building strong teams that are aligned with common interests and objectives, individuals are able to maximize their own performance while working together toward a common goal. This method provides better opportunities for high-performance results, which is increasingly valued in today’s fast-paced business environment.
Power of team alignment also requires applying basic principles of human resource management to execution, communication and coaching.
The power of team alignment is extremely useful for engaging people around common goals. But it is important to be mindful that the power is also a double-edged sword. If teams are not operating with a shared perspective and mutual trust, they can create more chaos than efficiency.
Trust is an essential component in any strong working relationship or team environment. This trust must go beyond simply having faith in your teammates’ skills as professionals; it must also include believing that they have the same commitment to building a sense of camaraderie as you do as a leader. Trust will help improve morale, strengthen and reduce stress among employees at all levels. It will also help raise your team’s productivity, without burning anyone out in the process.
Trust is built on more than just faith – it is about knowing you can count on each other to do what needs to be done when it needs to get done. Trust also means believing that everyone who works on your team shares a set of common goals and objectives. This can be particularly difficult when members are located at different sites or have different job functions.
However, this doesn’t mean you should expect everyone to become best friends with each other overnight. The goal isn’t for everyone to pat each on the back every time one person makes a sale. However, you need some way of building trust within the team so they will put their best foot forward and do what needs to get done.
It is also about being accountable for your actions and not making excuses when something fails or doesn’t meet expectations.
The main issue with trust is that you cannot simply will it into existence, but must instead find ways of earning it from others.” It takes time to build a solid relationship with people where they feel confident that they can count on you. As such, you can never be too hard on yourself when things don’t go as planned or one of the goals isn’t met. Instead, learn from your mistakes and move forward towards success.
Team alignment when delivering customer success is needed because of the fact that the dynamics of the teams it affects – whether you have a separate team or not – is different. For example, if we look at small companies which don’t have a customer success department there will be less than five people on board and this means that they ALL are responsible for each and every metric of the company. This means that they prioritize tasks based on deliverables to customers as well as new revenue opportunities.
When we move forward to bigger companies with multiple departments then we might find out that there can be some discrepancies in priorities regarding what tasks should be completed first and how much time product developers should dedicate to their jobs versus customer success representatives. If there isn’t any clear rule on this issue then you need to define it yourself by agreeing on the goals for the company and sorting out tasks based on their importance.
Don’t forget to define possible metrics which should be used in prioritizing tasks or your goals might be never met and there is a high possibility that you will not get any new customers at all. It is also good to realize that some day-to-day tasks can distract you from achieving your goals and it happens quite often. At this point, we need to prioritize customer success over product development because we want more customers than products created (if I am correct). This means that if demand for new features exceeds the capacity of developers then we have two options: hire more people which requires additional budget or stop advancing current features so they won’t be too old when new ones are ready.
