CX Leaders Have To Tackle Problems That Aren't Their Responsibility

If not you, who? If not now, when? These words get attributed to John Lewis, Teddy Roosevelt and countless others who weren't trying to transform the customer experience inside of a large, complex company.

But they all faced the conundrum that so many CX teams face:

This is not our problem to solve, but it's also not going to be solved by anyone else anytime soon. So if we want to tackle this big, complicated, cross-silo mess of an experience, we'll have to do it ourselves.

In this edition of the CX Patterns podcast and newsletter, I'm back with Gloria Gupta, MS, FCXP (CX I-III), the CX Professional of the year. She's sharing the case study of how the AMA transformed a major component of its customer experience.

You Will Have To Own Problems That Aren't Your Responsibility

The age-old question comes to mind: Who is responsible for the customer experience? The answer far too often, especially for the big, thorny problems in customer experience is nobody. And again, this is where I think the drawn-out arguments and tiresome comments from some folks miss the point entirely.

There are countless problems in experiences that have no owners.

That in fact explains a lot of how they have become problems in the first place, remained problems in the second place, and will be problems forever if someone doesn't take responsibility for them.

Literally solving the problem is outside of any one person or one team's purview.

Start By Making The Problem Visible And Comprehendable

Now of course problems this big should be on the radar of the C-suite. But they aren't when they aren't well articulated or understood. And often that's the first step in galvanizing support and action for a problem - making others aware of the fact that there is a problem, making them aware of the severity of the problem, making them aware that no one else is solving the problem.

There are so many reasons not to take action - surely someone else knows and is doing something about it, how bad can it be, it's not my job.

CX Teams Have The Best Reason Of All Not To Look Away - The Customer

CX Teams can't ignore problems impacting customers. I mean this literally - it's their responsibility to solve customer problems - but on other levels too. Philosophically, chemically, CX teams are not able to ignore simmering issues that impact customers.

The customer pain point that no one owns will cause you to lose sleep at night, so you might as well tackle it.

Galvanize Support And Collaboration To Solve The Problem

Identifying the problem, refusing to ignore the problem that does not mean you have to solve it on your own. Indeed, Gloria's case study highlights that the process to solve big, complex CX pain points with no single owners is just the opposite: Don't bring it into the CX team, take the CX team out to the organization to spark collaboration.

As Gloria highlighted, they quantified the scale of the problem, created compelling use cases, and then went out to the rest of the organization to figure out who else should be involved.

They worked collectively, exhaustively and over the long-term to reduce contact center volume, fix more than 100 sign-in issues, increasing membership, increasing traffic to their sites. Their success proves that big problems without owners can be tackled, tamed and transformed into better experiences. Don't despair when you find yourself in a similar situation. Get to work making others aware of the problem, and building a coalition to go solve the problem.

The problem is too big for any one person or team to own, and so it's too big for any one person or team to solve.