When the CEO of AT&T came to the office of the Wall Street Journal for lunch with maybe 10 of us editors and reporters in the early ‘90s, he brought along a clever gimmick to demonstrate his commitment to his employees and, ultimately, his customers. He brought an org chart that showed him not at the top but at the bottom. The idea was that he was there to support his direct reports, who supported their people and so on, until you got to the top of the chart and the front-line employees who were directly touching and supporting AT&T’s millions of customers. That thinking has become more mainstream in the intervening decades but springs to mind because of a smart piece that Jon Picoult of Watermark Consulting just published on “Two Words That Will Sabotage Your Customer Experience.” Those words are “back office.” Jon writes: “The moment employees start to feel that their work is invisible to the customer — that they are somehow “hidden” in a back office — they lose appreciation for the impact they have on customer impressions. That’s an unfortunate outcome, and one that can undermine employee engagement. It’s also based on an inaccurate premise, because every job in a company influences the customer experience, in one way or another…. You’re either serving the customer, or you’re serving someone else who does.” This month’s interview, with Sean Eldridge and Emily Cameron of Crosstie, adapts that sort of classic management theory to today’s environment of immensely powerful but complex technology. They describe how important it was for them to spend thousands of hours sitting down with their customers and their customers before Crosstie even started to build its technology platform, which serves carriers, TPAs, and self-insureds as they serve their customers. Only once Crosstie felt they deeply understood the problems they needed to solve did they work backward and build the technology and the company that supports that technology and the end customers. Sean and Emily talked about how customer experience now requires thinking in terms of an ecosystem, because so many technologies and companies may interact today. Think about an auto claim, where an agent may be coordinating with an adjuster, who’s working with a collision repair shop, which is coordinating with parts suppliers, perhaps a towing company and a rental car firm…. Technology, especially with the advent of generative AI, can handle a lot of coordination while keeping customers up to date on what’s happening, but the technology can also increase complexity and must be managed carefully. It feels like we’re making progress. Insurance companies seem to increasingly understand that everything and everyone matters when it comes to customer experience, that the whole company has to be lined up to support customers. But an awful lot of work lies ahead of us. Cheers, Paul P.S. If you want to read Jon Picoult’s full piece, you can find it here. (Two Words That Will Sabotage Your Customer Experience) | 
