Everything is connected

As a reminder, I read this article1 a short while ago, and am sharing my thoughts in individual blog posts.

Here is my 5th: Everything is connected

If you’ve followed my prior posts on this article, I wanted to reflect on the compound cost of bad employee onboarding, overwhelming customer onboarding, misaligned incentives, and metrics mania. With everyone slightly askew, and none of the benefits of scale in place, the entire experience suffers from end to end.

It can start with a poor product or service being built, then marketed & sold to customers based on company-goals and not customer goals, and supported post-sale based on “resolution rates” and “time to solve” metrics. At every turn, the customer is feeling the effects of the dysfunction at the company. If the company happens to be aware enough to recognize this — whether on their own or through customer escalations to executives — the solutions often follow the same dysfunctional patterns. Each department will look at their piece of the experience and work to optimize it locally.

I’ve heard this referred to in product development circles as “shipping your org chart.” Basically, you are forcing your customers to experience your product or service through the fragmented structure of your departments. At times, it feels like a bunch of individuals that don’t talk to each other, because… that’s probably mostly true.

Customers mostly see companies as singular entities. Customer service should know what Sales sold them and what Development built for them, and all of it should be integrated and holistic. When the experience doesn’t match that perspective, dissatisfaction occurs. In many cases, that dissatisfaction sits in the gaps between departments, and there is no one single executive responsible for fixing it — other than the CEO, perhaps.

Here’s an example from my own experience that occurred almost 2 decades ago. We were developing a new user interface for a subscription product, and all of the prototype usability research we conducted was positive. At one point, we offered it to several customers early to get their feedback before we scaled its release (e.g., late-Beta test). When we conducted satisfaction surveys with these early customers, we were surprised to find that they were unhappy and frustrated. We sent out researchers to meet with them 1:1 in-person to find out where we had gone so wrong with the UI. It turned out that most of these customers were experiencing problems with OTHER parts of the business, and these problems were significant enough that it was dominating their thoughts more than the delight of the new UI. For example, for a few customers, the billing system was double-charging folks, or mis-charging them, and when you mess with someone’s money that becomes their foremost thought about you. So, despite the new UI being delightful, the customers' couldn’t see past our billing mistakes and that influenced their assessment of everything else we did.

The best product & customer service can be undone by a sales or marketing campaign that over-promises capabilities. The best sales pitch & product offering can be undone by customer service agents that promise call-backs and then never do. The best sales & support can be undone by a product that crashes daily. It’s not enough for any one department to meet their goals, exceed their metrics, and be great. The combined experience of every department together needs to be accounted for together.

This holistic view is incredibly pervasive among customers, and incredibly powerful. Company leaders need to recognize this and be vigilant in how they view their internal metrics and departmental goals against this whole. It is especially important that leaders look for gaps between departments and address them.

Other posts in this series:

• Post 1: Overwhelming details for employees

• Post 2: Overwhelming details for customers

• Post 3: Misaligned incentives

• Post 4: KPI’s at scale

• Post 5: Everything is connected

• Post 6: Empowered guidelines

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1. I originally read this article in Apple News+ which doesn’t provide direct links to articles outside of the News app. I tried to find the article on Entrepreneur Magazine’s website, but found 0 search results for the title of the article as well as the author’s name. (Both seem like bad user experience choices to me, by the way.) I ended up finding the article on the website I linked to above as a last resort.  ↩︎