Sales, Service and Marketing are convergingAnd the point of intersection is customer experience

There’s been a lot of talk recently

about alignment.

Sales and Marketing alignment.

Marketing and Service alignment.

Service and...

…you get the idea.

It means something like ‘making sure customer-facing teams work towards a common goal’.

And by ‘common goal’ we generally mean…

…‘creating great customer experiences’.

Learn how to, with our expert guide.

Alignment has been hailed as a miracle cure for a host of customer experience problems.

Problems that arise when teams work in

isolation and their wires get crossed – or the wires that should get

crossed don’t.

Problems that make it impossible to create

experiences that keep customers coming back.

And the worst part about these bad practices?

They’re self-inflicted.

salespeople, customer service leaders and marketers.

The systems and structures that hold salespeople, customer service teams and marketers back were created by…

Sure, they were designed to help us win customers and keep them happy.

But if you’d asked an actual, real-life consumer to design their ideal experience, you’d get something that looked very, very different.

Each department was trying to help customers. But because they weren’t talking to each other, they were actually making the customer experience worse.

So tighter alignment of Sales, Marketing and Customer Service was an answer to that problem...

...and it worked!

When you get alignment right:

• Marketing budgets work harder

• Sales conversion rates go up

• Fewer opportunities are wasted

• Customer issues are resolved faster

Which, for lots of us, sounds like a job well done.

But for a growing number of us (the ones whose desire to please customers teeters on the brink of obsession) it’s still not enough.

Something bigger needs to happen, and we think it’s already underway.

It’s what happens when you take the thinking behind alignment to its logical conclusion.

We call it convergence.

If alignment

working in parallel,

convergence

coming together to work as one.

The order to align might come from the

guys at the top.

But real convergence often happens from

the bottom up.

It’s driven by customer demand for a flawless, seamless experience wherever and however they interact with your brand.

It’s enabled by collaborative technology but it’s led by the people on the front line of customer engagement.

They’re the ones who have to meet these new expectations every day – and when we fail, they feel it first-hand.

It starts when a marketer spots a red-hot upsell opportunity.

Or when a salesperson solves a customer care issue.

Or when a service rep looks at common customer queries and comes up with a great content marketing idea.

This kind of convergence isn’t just desirable…

...it’s inevitable.

Individually, these departments have had their own Eureka moment.

“ Holy synergy! This works better than silos!”

Now they’re catching each other’s eye across the office.

Success breeds success.

Collaboration takes off.

Customers are happier – and keep coming back.

So what does convergence look like?

1. Alignment – in pursuit of common goals

2. Communication – sharing insights (actually, y’know, talking to each other)

3. Measurement – tracking the same metrics

And here’s the surprising one: 4. Even greater specialisation.

Four things:

It may seem paradoxical, but this kind of convergence is achieved through greater specialisation, not less.

Customer needs aren’t best served by a team of generalists working in an amorphous blob of a department.

The ideal is a single customer-serving discipline – but it’s made up of as many distinct specialisms as it takes.

It’s a platform where anyone in the business can get a single view of a customer and solve a bunch of issues when they arise – though not necessarily all of them.

And when they come across a problem they can’t solve, they know just the person who can.

Of course, it won’t be an easy change – especially for some of the more traditional VPs of the Old Way.

But this isn’t revolution...

...it’s evolution.

From the business’s point of view, it’s a revenue-generating machine with lots of moving parts doing their bit.

And it’s always learning.

It’s not the end of Sales, Marketing and Service, but it could be the beginning of the end of the discrete departments as we know them.

Ready for the Great Convergence?

Connected customer experiences start with connected companies.

Make sure you’re ready. Read our expert guide.