Customer Value Squads: Empower Customer-Focused Teams While Avoiding Chaos
A NEW KIND OF TEAM IS EMERGING – PURPOSE-BUILT FOR AGILITY – at the company edge, where marketers, salespeople, and service professionals meet customers. Many companies have benefitted from agile methodologies, but I believe most are unaware of the organizational innovations also available.
The company edge is a volatile, uncertain environment that confounds the delivery of skillful customer experience. Leaders in turbulent environments including software development, healthcare, the military, and sports, have learned that success under these conditions requires people close to the action to respond as quickly as the situation changes. But conventional organizations were designed for efficiency and control, not agility.
To increase agility and improve the customer experience, companies must renovate their organizations by creating the empowered edge teams I call Customer Value Squads. These lean, multidisciplinary squads require both mind shifts and modernized practices to succeed.
Read the full white paper: Customer Value Squads: Empower Customer-focused Teams While Avoiding Chaos
Today’s organization is ill-equipped for the VUCA customer world.
The company edge is what scientists call a complex system, more like the weather than a predictable machine. Interactions between individuals, buying groups, and enterprises create feedback loops producing many unknowns and outcomes that are impossible to predict. These systems are sometimes labeled VUCA, an acronym meaning volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. VUCA is why customer journeys seem more like a child’s scribble than an orderly funnel, and why predictable marketing return-on-investment (ROI) remains out of reach.
Companies at the dawn of the industrial-era weren’t concerned with VUCA. They had other urgent problems. The manufacture of goods at scale needed labor approaches that were more efficient, repeatable, and controllable than the bespoke craft work methods of earlier times. Frederick Winslow Taylor and other early management consultants innovated, then codified, structures that became wildly successful. For decades, companies using the model Taylor called “scientific management”, which included elements such as management hierarchies, functional silos, and processes that represented “the one best way”, outperformed competitors. These efficient conventions are widely used today.
But even as scientific management flourished, it became increasingly apparent that the farther work strayed from repetitious, limited-skill tasks, the harder it became to find the “one best way.” Today, technology has automated most repetition and companies are discovering that many industrial-era conventions are too slow, too ignorant, too uncoordinated, and too rigid to deliver business value that depends on innovation, customer experience, and agility.
The Inadequacy of Sales and Marketing Alignment
The gap between today’s need for quality customer experience and agility and the conventional organization’s inability to deliver these benefits explodes at the company’s VUCA edge. Companies often blame the departments involved. Marketing and sales should be natural partners, companies insist, because they share revenue and customer satisfaction goals. So, companies try vigorously to “align” these two groups.The mindset that produces alignment as an organizational solution has its roots in the industrial-era assumption that marketing and sales, like machine components, must remain separate and distinct. Alignment activities include breaking down communication barriers and operationally coordinating through a raft of service-level agreements (SLAs), complex processes, metrics, and technology, then stamping out disagreements that never seem to resolve. In almost all situations, the fix is inadequate. The sales team feels perpetually under-supported, and the marketing team perpetually overworked.
The alternative model envisions the company edge as an integrated system rather than a collection of piece parts that must be “aligned” to function well. The future of customer engagement must go beyond alignment to reflect the integrated digital-human way customers really buy.
Read: Today sales is lucky to get 5% of customer attention. It’s time to ditch the first-digital-then-human process and truly integrate.
A New Kind of Edge Team: Customer Value Squads
Customer Value Squads are lean teams, which some companies may call pods or cells, typically consisting of 6-10 members. Developing Customer Value Squads requires companies to adopt mindsets and practices markedly different from those designed for the industrial era.
Mind Shifts for Customer Value Squads
Focus less on how to solve a problem and more on who can solve it: Processes are important, but employees aren’t merely widgets paid to perform within them. VUCA challenges require employees’ entrepreneurial spirit, creativity, and problem-solving and companies must foster this potential.
Empower the edge: People close to the customer know what is needed better than those deeper in the organization and therefore need to operate more autonomously. However, empowerment is different from decentralization. Control isn’t transferred or delegated – it’s formally shared.
Move from leader as commander to leader as gardener: Instead of envisioning leaders who orchestrate empires, a more modern model are leaders whose role is cultivating environments where great people flourish. Gardeners don’t command plants to grow. Plants (and people) develop on their own – provided they have optimal soil, light, and nutrients.
Practices for Customer Value Squad Performance
Orient squads around a customer value mission: Rather than orienting teams on something internally relevant, such as their function, squads must be customer-centric, each delivering things customers would value, such as great products, useful information, or buying services.
Form multidisciplinary teams: Agility requires a semi-autonomous team with the array of core skills necessary to analyze, decide, solve problems, and act.
Create radical transparency: Squads can only respond accurately if they have a high level of trusted, real-time information.
Use Agile methods: Agile methods (e.g., Scrum, Kanban) accept – even welcome – change. They are great at increasing speed and flexibility without sacrificing coordination or quality.
Practices for Customer Value Squad Coordination
Link with a collaborative network: Squads must be linked to the broader organization in a constellation of teams united by a common purpose. Companies still need structure to operate at scale, but the organization can be more flexibly organized than traditional hierarchies.
Support and guide with common services: Squads will need augmented expertise and technology to stay integrated and coordinated. These services are provided by teams at the company’s core. These core teams must also make squad work simpler and more productive, and not add bureaucracy.
Keep squads accountable. Although squads are empowered, their work is not a free-for-all. When people are both empowered and accountable, they are more careful. The right metrics managed flexibly, along with accountability as a team, help keep work on track.
Every company can immediately start progressing towards Customer Value Squads. And chances are many companies are already on the journey with initiatives including agile marketing, tiger teams, account-based marketing, or customer success management. Customer Value Squads help companies improve the customer experience while avoiding chaos. It’s time to take off the industrial-era shackles and become agile at the edge.
For more information, case studies, and tips to get started with Customer Value Squads, read the white paper.