Why Team Collaboration is Critical to CX

With customer experience management becoming a key component of any service-oriented business strategy, many brands are focusing on ensuring that all the elements of their customer experience strategy are working seamlessly together.

While this is critical, uniting the various touchpoints and forms of communication that retail stores, hotels, restaurants and other kinds of companies use has to come secondary to ensuring that the staff is on the same page when it comes to providing service to customers.

This might seem like a pretty simple premise, but there are many complications that can get in the way of efficient staff collaboration. Team sizes, employee turnover, and even language differences can all obstruct effective communication, and in turn, have a negative impact on customers. 

Some Issues Need All Hands

One of the easiest to understand reasons why team collaboration is essential to customer experience is that many customer issues require multiple staff members to be solved effectively. This simple reality makes communication between different departments, and between individual members of these teams, absolutely imperative. Communication tools help with this because they can remove barriers to communication by providing an open forum for discussion and team problem-solving. 

Office environments have embraced tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams to create a space for employees to have these conversations and to solve problems. Other kinds of work environments do not necessarily have every employee working on a computer all day, making a collaboration platform based on instant messaging a more difficult sell. However, there are still ways for these teams to use collaboration software, but they tend to stay in the hands of managers.

Keep Your Team in the Loop

Even if a customer issue does not directly impact the workload of every employee, there are times where the entire organization benefits from notifying multiple members of the team. This is true when a team member encounters an uncommon issue that other employees can learn from it. Keeping team members informed about different challenges they face is not just useful for new hires, but for seasoned employees who may find a refresher useful.

In general, keeping employees well informed has a considerable impact on employee satisfaction. This is especially true with communication from the company’s leadership. A satisfied employee will always be more suited to handle customers and give them the excellent service they expect.

Is Overcommunication a Problem?

However, some managers are concerned that the tools which allow teams to communicate so easily will have negative consequences on their business’ productivity. The term “over-communication” has been controversial among business leaders since there is a fine line between constant distractions and good employee engagement. Businesses that avoid employee collaboration tools worry that employees will become overdependent on them and that they will be distracting or prevent productive face-to-face conversations.

While these are valid concerns, collaboration tools are often not the cause of team communication issues, but instead, existing problems are made more visible through these tools. The benefits of tools like Slack for offices outweigh the negatives for many companies, even though removing barriers to communication can result in a steady stream of notifications that employees might find irritating. When a task that involves multiple team members needs to be solved, especially when dealing with remote workers or in a large work environment, the ability to quickly message the involved parties is deeply valuable.

Encouraging Focused Communication

Since most concerns about collaboration software revolve around unnecessary or unfocused communication that wastes time and hurts productivity, the best way to get the most out of these tools is to do the seemingly obvious and use them to focus on issues that impact customers and the company’s CX.

Training employees to properly use collaboration tools will work in many cases, as a Slack study finds that both employees and employers highly value efficiency in their collaborative efforts. However, even companies that are full of focused, dedicated employees can fall into unproductive communication habits. 

The key question is how businesses can empower efficient communication while avoiding patterns of communication that are more distracting than they are productive. A solution to this industry-defining dilemma is to have all conversations be sparked by and revolve around issues that need to be solved. This kind of alert-based collaboration platform doesn’t only encourage concentrated communication, but it also provides a space for team members to learn how problems can be solved as a team. 

Using platforms that empower teams to solve problems in a structured way that can easily involve everyone who might be of assistance will set a standard for efficient teamwork that empowers teams to deliver consistently great customer experiences.

Helix by MicroMetrics lets hotel teams do just this by providing a space for employees to work together to solve guest issues in real time. Team inboxes and alert tags make it easy for team members to stay organized and keep team conversations focused on pressing issues.

Helix by MicroMetrics helps hotels enact service recovery strategies in real time, preventing negative reviews and developing guest loyalty.

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