When Competing Priorities Compete with the Customer

In my last post, I wrote about a customer service experience that has become increasingly common. A company moves customers into chatbots, automated workflows, and scripted support channels. From inside the company, the process may look efficient. From the customer’s side, it can feel like more time, less service, and mounting frustration.

In many organizations, competing demands emerge because each department is doing what it has been asked to do, while being evaluated against different success criteria:

• Operations may be evaluated on capacity, volume, and speed.

• Finance may be evaluated on cost, margin, and labor efficiency.

• Technology may be evaluated on system performance, scalability, and workflow completion.

• Legal or Risk may be evaluated on consistency, compliance, and limiting exceptions.

• Customer Experience may be evaluated on satisfaction, trust, retention, and resolution.

It is easy to see how competing demands emerge since each department has distinctly different success criteria. Unfortunately, it is the customer who ends up feeling the impact of those competing demands.  

How do you change this dynamic?

Many companies say they put the customer first, but for the reasons above, their internal measures often make that difficult in practice.

Different departmental goals naturally create competing priorities. Leaders can evaluate those priorities with this unifying question: Does this decision make the customer’s experience better or worse?

• Operations still stives for efficiency, with attention to whether the process helps the customer get the issue resolved.

• Finance still manages cost, with attention to whether the savings strengthen or weaken the customer relationship.

• Technology still builds scalable systems, with the priority that those systems improve the customer experience.

• Legal or Risk still protects the company, with attention to whether policy application preserves trust.

• Customer Experience still owns its distinct role in understanding and improving the customer relationship, while helping the rest of the organization see how their decisions shape that experience.

This prioritization does not change the fact that resources are limited and tradeoffs still have to be made. Leaders must decide where time, money, people, and attention belong.

Instead of asking whether one department’s measure improved, the leadership team must ask what happened to the customer experience as a whole.

• Did the process help the customer solve the problem?

• Did it respect the customer’s time?

• Did it preserve trust?

• Did it strengthen the relationship?

• Did it reflect what the company says it is there to do?

Maintaining focus on the customer experience helps leaders align competing priorities across the organization.