Harvard Business Review’s latest research study reveals how the world’s most successful companies are using cross-functional teams to deliver app experiences that deepen customer loyalty.
We live in the age of unlimited choice, where consumers are empowered and their expectations are high. Organizations are under more pressure than ever to deliver exceptional customer experiences. And in our mobile-first world, poor app performance is more than a minor customer annoyance; it is now a serious business problem. In fact, nearly one-third of respondents in a recent AppDynamics survey said they have taken their business elsewhere due to poor digital experiences, and a quarter would be less likely to use the service in the future.
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So, what do the most successful companies do differently in terms of how they assess and improve their customer experience (CX) apps?
The Key to Creating Loyal Customers
According to HBR’s new research report, Using Real-Time Data to Drive Deep Customer Loyalty, bringing together cross-functional teams—and arming these teams with frequent, real-time app performance data and business analytics—is the key to delivering app experiences that result in stronger customer loyalty and retention.
In the study, HBR found that the companies with the greatest amount of customer loyalty involve the largest number of functions—including customer service, IT, R&D, and product support—to assess and improve the customer app experience. While nearly 70 percent of leading companies say customer service/care is heavily involved in managing the customer experience, only 44 percent of laggards can say the same. And nearly 60 percent of leaders involve product development and R&D, compared to just 32 percent of laggards.
Rather than operating in silos, these leaders develop agile, cross-functional teams to optimize the customer app experience, driving deep customer loyalty and, ultimately, profitability.
How Cross-Functional Teams Offer a Competitive Advantage
Let’s say you notice your online cart abandonment rate is increasing, with most customers dropping off once they reach the shipping details page. There could be a lot of different things at play here that involve different teams. For example, could the cause be that the online checkout process is too confusing? Or perhaps shipping costs are too high or the shipping speed is too slow? Having access to real-time app performance metrics—in this case, the cart abandonment data—is critical, but it also only gives you part of the picture. Being able to analyze the data with a cross-functional team allows organizations to get to the heart of why customers are abandoning your cart, so you can develop an effective game plan to fix the problem.
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Different functions also have their own goals and priorities. Without a cross-functional team in place, these priorities may conflict and cause poor trade-offs to emerge. IT may be charged with reducing web page load time, but marketing might need richer design elements and beefier functionality in order to sell the audience on a luxury purchase like expensive jewelry or a high-end automobile. If IT, working in a silo, were to remove some of that content just to meet load-time goals, it could have disastrous consequences for the business. Without interdepartmental collaboration, the app experience suffers, as does the bottom line.
As these two examples demonstrate, a cross-functional approach is a significant competitive advantage when it comes to improving the customer experience. With a cross-functional perspective, organizations can better understand and troubleshoot the root cause of app performance issues, as well as evaluate and optimize any trade-off decisions that have to be made concerning an application’s performance and functionality.
Eliminating Siloed Behavior and Thinking
While “cross-functional” is a word that gets thrown around a lot in today’s business landscape, simply telling departments to work together isn’t enough. It requires a fundamental change in an organization’s culture—driven by a shift in mindset—to put customer experience above all else.
This notion aligns to that of AIOps, which requires teams to shift their mindset away from siloed monitoring tools and embrace AI-based systems that help identify root case, predict performance, recommend optimizations, and automate fixes in real-time.
Similarly, to create a nimble cross-functional team that can quickly and effectively work together to improve the customer experience, teams must embrace collaboration versus working in isolation.
To push organizations towards this mindset, it’s often helpful to build teams centered around solving a specific problem, and then to give them full decision-making authority and control. An employee with expertise in a particular area can be put in charge and become the general manager of the team, with a customer committee or council overseeing the work of the team. As Gerard du Toit, partner and head of global customer experience capabilities at Bain & Co. notes, “Companies don’t have to reorganize themselves in order to avoid siloed thinking. They can create cross-functional and agile teams to address a particular challenge such as setting up a new account or improving online check out.”
Creating a centralized analytics hub can also give cross-functional teams the real-time app performance data they need to make optimal business decisions. An analytics hub can track and report on data from across the organization, providing actionable insights into the best course of action when a trade-off decision needs to be made—such as whether the budget is better spent on marketing or product support to solve the specific business problem at hand. An analytics hub can powerfully neutralize the effects of siloed behavior—and its impact on the bottom line—by providing hard, objective data unaffected by any corporate or group dynamics that might exist.
Winning the Battle for Customer Loyalty
When every click or swipe has the potential to help or hurt an organization’s bottom line, companies can no longer afford to deliver a mediocre customer experience when it comes to their websites and mobile apps. Building a cross-functional team and empowering it with the resources it needs to monitor, analyze, and improve the customer experience takes time and effort, but it is essential to delivering an app experience that strengthens customer loyalty.
By creating agile cross-functional teams designed to address specific business challenges—and equipping them with easily accessible real-time performance data—organizations can finally win the hard-fought quest for customer loyalty.
Access the Full Research
For more exclusive insights from HBR’s research into the relationship between app performance, customer experience, and brand loyalty, download the report Using Real-Time Data to Drive Deep Customer Loyalty.
