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Is The Root Of Poor Customer Experience Internal Corporate Dysfunction?

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To improve customer experience means throwing the baby out with the bath water. It's a ton of work. Not to mention all the people who loved that baby that now hate you. The ugly truth is that many executives at big companies are barely treading water. They are already working overtime, stressed about taking on more jobs or being replaced by someone younger and cheaper (or maybe even someday soon, a robot). They want to maintain the status quo. To add insult to injury the biggest predictor of employee success at a big company has to do with like-ability. The predictor of success is not getting stuff done like you would assume. And if you are going to make sweeping changes, it's likely people are not going to like you.

What customers experience as dysfunction, broken processes and the pain it is to do business with a given company is a result of the cultural dysfunction happening inside a big company. A piece of cultural dysfunction at a big company can include but is not limited to people who have been in their jobs way too long, and want to maintain the status quo. It's likely if you are a successful change agent within your company you are either:

A. A fairy godmother freak

B. A normal human being who ruffled a lot of feathers (and had to leave the company soon after said ruffled feathers)

I believe this is why change agents only stay at companies a few years. People end up resenting them. They are like kale, good for the company's health and longevity--hated by everyone else who has a sweet tooth--looking for the instant gratification of quarterly profits.

When you work at a big company you're dealing with a lot of politics. Just to survive at a big company people's sole reason for working is to:

A. Make their boss happy

B. Make their boss look good

C. Work for someone influential to get promoted

D. Get promoted some other freak way

You know the secret about big companies? There are only a few positions at the top--everyone wants those positions--and employees are perpetually frustrated because they are rarely given raises or promoted.

You might get promoted if...

A. Someone influential likes you

B. You got noticed for a project or program you did (and managed to take credit for the work a lot of people did)

C. You remind someone in a higher position of themselves

D. You follow directions and don't ask questions

I'm almost positive no one in the history of the corporate world got promoted for pushing the company (and the people who work there) to change their ways and move faster--especially if this person is not very senior within the company.

So why does this impact customer experience? The reason this is a problem is the reason you were put on hold for 20 minutes with a call center (and were then hung up on), or the reason you had to repeat your information to your bank five times, or the reason no one responded to your Tweet or a company deleted your comments from their Facebook wall.

Big companies treat customers really bad and no one does anything about it. So why aren't more people rising up within the company to champion the customer's plight? The reason is these employees have baby formula to buy, car and house payments to make, and a trip to Hawaii planned on one of their two sacred weeks off for the entire year. So about that customer left on hold for twenty minutes and hung up on--yah sorry about that....

Will customer experience be the downfall of many of the Fortune 500 companies today? It's likely.

Facebook's motto was formerly "Move Fast and Break Things."

To keep up with the pace of customer preference--in the age of technology--companies need to move fast and break things for the sake of customer experience. But most companies would rather explode than see that poster on their walls. If an executive were to see the Facebook motto on their wall it might translate to "Make People Uncomfortable and Kill Our Legacy." Even Facebook--no longer a small company--graduated to a more stable motto, "Move Fast With Infra" (which means move fast with a stable infrastructure).

Do you agree that the rampant amount of bad customer experiences can be traced back to the employees and corporate dysfunction? Please share in the comments section below.

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