You can have a great customer experience strategy, journey maps and state of the art technology, but unless your operating model can consistently deliver on the customer touchpoints they are responsible for in the way you have promised, it starts to come apart.
We see this when front and back of house teams work in silos chasing their own priorities, the same problems keep recurring because root causes are not fixed and there are multiple hand offs and manual work driving inconsistency, resulting in higher operational costs and lost opportunities to deepen customer relationships.
This is why we have included Operations as a category in our CX Scorecard.
The real problems this solves
When your operations aren't aligned to the customer touch points, you can't keep your promises. When your operating model can't fulfil what customers expect, expectations are missed. Service levels and quality fluctuates depending on which channel they use or even which day they interact with you. Missed expectations erode trust quickly.
You're firefighting instead of fixing. When operational problems occur, teams resolve the immediate issue but don't address why it happened. You're trapped in reactive mode, spending resources on failure demand rather than eliminating the causes of failure.
And silos create friction that customers experience. When teams, systems and processes aren't in sync, customers feel the disconnection. The gaps and hand offs between the silos becomes the problem.
What strong capability looks like
The system and processes are designed around customer touchpoints. Rather than asking customers to navigate internal complexity, they design the operation from the customer's perspective. They remove unnecessary steps, automate routine work and structure processes around what customers are trying to achieve, as well what is efficient operationally.
Front and back of house work as one system. Teams, systems and processes are orchestrated by design to meet expectations. And when issues do arise, they solve them together rather than pointing fingers.
They consistently deliver what they promise. Service commitments are grounded in what operations can reliably deliver not based on grit and determination but by design. Performance is consistent across channels, teams and timeframes. Customers experience reliability rather than variation.
They fix root causes, not just symptoms. When operational problems occur, they investigate why it happened and address the underlying systemic issue so it doesn't happen again. They distinguish between failure demand and value demand then systematically eliminate failures.
What we're measuring
We're identifying whether your operations can deliver on the touchpoints in customer journeys or whether organisational silos and reactive firefighting create friction.
Organisations that align operations around keeping promises and fixing root causes are the ones that build and maintain trust and achieve better commercial outcomes by reducing failure demand and creating opportunities to deepen the relationship with customers.
If you're responsible for the customer experience but can't consistently deliver what you promise or you're spending resources fixing the same problems repeatedly rather than addressing why they happen, that's the gap this capability fills.
Get your CX Scorecard to see exactly where your capability sits and receive personalised recommendations on where to improve.
