A customer experience overhaul—whether within or across a company’s channels to customers—must involve every organizational unit that touches customers. That includes customer-facing business functions (marketing, sales, service); product/service lines; units based on channels (for example the e-commerce division) and regions.

1. | Copyright © 2015 Tata Consultancy Services Limited
Finding the Right Organizational Design for Your
Customer Experience
Tonya McKinney, Principal and Head – Customer Experience Solutions, Global Consulting Practice, TCS
Denise Friedman, Practice Head – Organizational Performance, Global Consulting Practice, TCS
October 2015

2. Companies are shifting
from product-centered
approaches to customer-
centered organizational
designs.
To overhaul customer
experience and execute
new initiatives,
companies must update
obsolete business
processes.
Organizational Design, 2015
Introduction: Organizational Design

3. Inflexible silos of functions, lines of business, channels to market, and regions can
affect Customer Experience (CX) improvement initiatives.
Organizational Design, 2015
The drawbacks of rigid organization design

4. As digital strategies and
experience initiatives
converge, ownership of
the customer experience
becomes blurred. Trying
to graft new customer
experience onto old
organizational models is
a recipe for trouble.
Three dominant
organizational models are
currently being used to
support improved
experience. Two
emerging models may
become prevalent in
coming decades.
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Organizational Models

5. In the oversight model,
the group in charge of
experience
transformation has the
power to recommend but
not to mandate its
advice.
To use the oversight
model effectively,
companies should
develop business cases
and ROI models for
customer experience
programs.
They must set up a
program management
office and keep programs
on track across silos.
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1: Oversight Model

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In this model, companies
have shared services
centers to support the
customer experience
vision.
The enablement model
creates a single source of
customer information
that’s fed across all
channels.
By using shared insight,
this model breaks down
silo barriers.
2: Enablement Model

7. The authority model
ensures that groups
central to the initiative
are aligned with the
experience vision.
Centralizing control
means changes can be
implemented quickly.
This model addresses
organizational silos. It
leads company-wide
transformation to
customer-centricity.
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3: Authority Model

8. In the dominant models,
customers are passed
along various internal
units throughout the
customer experience.
Customer service can
easily become a silo-to-
silo bucket brigade and
positive experience can
be lost.
Emerging models are
trying to remedy those
problems and further
break down silos.
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4: Emerging Models

9. In this emerging model, companies go to market through customer segments that
span traditional product silos. Experience managers own the end-to-end
experience for one or more target segments. Channels and functions—from R&D
to the supply chain—are essentially shared services.
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4A: Segment Experience Model

10. This model depends
heavily on digital
capabilities to facilitate
collaboration with
customers.
Customers co-design the
experience with the
company by selecting
from digital modules of
services and features.
A flexible, modular, and
interactive digital
infrastructure is essential
for this model.
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4B Customer-driven Experience Model

11. Advanced models seek to
break silos and build
experience around the
customer.
The organizational model
adopted will be crucial to
achieving the experience
vision.
A shift to customer-
centered design requires
deep customer insights
and mature systems of
engagement.
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Conclusion: Breaking Silos

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