Customers don’t experience problems according to our org chart.
1. When goals compete, who owns the outcome?
When a fix involves several teams, it has to compete with the work each team has already planned.
Even when everyone agreed about the cause, it was hard to find room for the work on another team’s roadmap.
A problem that matters to customers does not automatically become a priority for every team.
I ran into this more than once. If every team meets its targets but customers keep calling about the same issue, what are those targets serving?
2. An inquiry isn’t yet a task a product team can act on.
Telling a product team that ‘transaction history inquiries are rising’ may not help much.
They can reasonably reply, ‘That feature already exists.’
But ‘tax-filing customers can’t download records for the period and format they need’ points to an actual gap.
Now we know what needs to change and who to talk to.
To go from an inquiry to action, we need more than a category or a volume count.
What was the customer trying to finish? Where did it fail? How often? For how long? Which team can change it, and why should it become a priority?
To the customer, this is one problem: finishing a tax filing. Internally, resolving it may require work across product, policy, systems, and operations. Each team needs a specific change it can own, without losing sight of the customer’s original goal.
Each team could finish its part while the customer is still stuck.
I’ve had to do this across channel and AI projects. We fixed some issues, but the next one often meant finding the right people and starting the discussion again.
Looking back, my colleagues and I were not simply running a chatbot. We wanted customers to finish what they came to do, even when the fix was outside the chatbot. Yet connecting the relevant teams was not a clearly assigned role. Someone had to step beyond their remit. Without that link, even a successful technology launch can leave the original problem untouched.
Sometimes I wonder whether a simpler question from leadership could help: ‘Why does this keep happening, and who owns finding out?’ The cause may span teams, but responsibility for investigating it does not have to be vague.
Collecting more feedback won’t fix this by itself.
A customer problem needs to become a concrete improvement task, with someone accountable and a way to measure the result.
For years it was difficult even to spot these patterns in thousands of conversations. AI makes that easier, but it doesn’t tell us who should take responsibility.
#CustomerExperience #ProductOperations #ContactCenter