Designing Your CX Workforce Like A Football Team
In his book, Foundations For Customer Centricity, CX Rockstar James Dodkins shares primary learnings for a CXO looking to build a customer-centric organisational culture.
In 1766, the 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith gave the world the much-renowned theory of division of labour. Smith argued that breaking a task into small specialised atomistic units helps in increasing efficiency. He offered the example of the pin-manufacturing industry where ten individuals, each doing a specialised task, could produce about forty-eight thousand pins a day, as opposed to each working separately and independently. “The ten workers would be lucky to make two hundred or even ten pins combined in one day.” This was Smith’s thought.
While long-held as common sense for economic efficiency in how businesses organise themselves, the theory might be outdated. When we think of winning customer experiences, James Dodkins, CX Evangelist at Pegasystems, has a different and rather unique opinion.
Can you have 11 goalkeepers?
A former guitarist and now a CX musical keynote speaker, Dodkins thinks the industrial-age manner of organising people needs to go. In his book Foundations For Customer Centricity, Dodkins advises a new way of organising teams at work for a successful CX output.
“We split people up based on their skill sets and core competencies – that’s because it was the easiest thing to do back in the day. But as time and technology have evolved, businesses have become much bigger, more complicated, and more difficult to navigate. Everything has changed in that time — except — the way we organise ourselves. We still organise in a pyramid, and split people up based on their skills and core competencies. I suggest in the book that we should organise people like a football team.”
Dodkins says there are certain dynamics involved in a football team—it’s a team that’s put together with different skills and core competencies.
“You’ve got a goalkeeper, defenders, midfielders, strikers — and even within them, they’ve got different specialisms of what they’re particularly good at. Now, if we were to organise a football team, like a business in the pyramid, we’d have a striker department, a midfielder department, a defender department, and you would never put 11 goalkeepers out on the field. You just wouldn’t do it. But that’s what we do in business.”
What most businesses do today is put all of the salespeople together, all of the customer service people together, and all the accounting people together. We split people up based on what they’re good at doing. Whereas a football team, Dodkins says, puts people together based on one thing, one target, one outcome, and that is to win the game.
James leaves us with three main questions to ask ourselves. Number one, who is the customer? “When it comes to a football team, who would you say the customer is? The fans, the people in the crowd watching the game.”
“I get some weird answers with that. Sometimes people say it’s the manager of the team, the owner of the team, one person once said – the ball. You’re going too abstract there. It’s the fans – they are the customers,” Dodkins shares common responses.
Next, for a fan watching a game, what is the ultimate successful outcome for them? That the team they support wins the game.
Next, what team do you put together to achieve that? That’s the coach’s or the manager’s job. They put a team together that is best suited to achieve that outcome for the customers.
James suggests this is what we need to do in business. “Ask yourself – who is my customer? Try and understand them at a deep, meaningful level, and don’t just understand their demographics, understand their psychographics, understand who they are, their values, lifestyles, behaviours, and influences. Then understand different scenarios with the business — What is the successful outcome? What is that one thing they are trying to achieve? And what team do we need to put together from different people that are best suited to work together and deliver that outcome?”
Put The Customer Second, Not First
One of James’s published works discusses ideas for employee engagement. Another book says to put the customer second. We asked Dodkins why he thinks employee engagement is so meaningful and how companies can prioritise EX for better CX.
“I truly believe that if you want to put your customers first, you need to put your employees first, first,” says James.
Dodkins says the common opinion is you can’t make happy customers with unhappy employees. “You can. It’s just a lot harder. You look at people like Amazon, for example. For a long time, Amazon created very happy customers but had a lot of unhappy employees.”
Dodkins explains how Amazon changed its culture to emphasise employee experience. “They’ve now realised that they can’t do that forever. Their old mission was to become the world’s most customer-centric company. Now they want to become like the world’s best employer or something like that.” He adds that if a business has a group of people that love the company and love work every day, they’re going to do better for the customer.
“It’s a bit of a no-brainer; we don’t need books to explain it. We all agree: ‘Let’s treat our employees well, and they will deliver better customer experiences. Customers will like us more; they will spend more money. Therefore, it will be better for the company.
Agreed? Agreed. Employee engagement settled.”
