A Critical Need: Cross-Functional Strategy for Customer Experience Touchpoints
The hard truth about customer experience is simple: every function that interacts with a customer, directly or indirectly, shapes their experience. Engineering, product, operations, customer support, marketing, retail, and digital all influence how customers move through the journey. Yet most organizations still operate as if CX belongs to a single department.
It doesn’t.
CX is an enterprise strategy.
And when it isn’t treated that way, minor issues compound, misalignment grows, and customers bear the burden of internal fragmentation they were never meant to see.
Despite this reality, CX is rarely integrated into strategic planning. It is often handed off to reactive teams or addressed only after friction becomes visible. Even worse, many companies examine CX in silos rather than understanding the interconnected dependencies that shape the end-to-end experience.
Here’s the truth:
When a breakdown occurs anywhere in the journey, the customer feels it everywhere. Internal teams may not see the gaps, but customers absolutely do.
A Real-World Example: When a Simple Claims Process Becomes a Four-Day Journey
Recently, I needed to file a replacement phone claim with a well-known mobile carrier. With insurance in place, the process should have been quick and straightforward. Instead, the journey stretched across four days, revealing breakdowns across digital, operational, and human touchpoints.
The login system only supported one authentication method, the very method I lost access to.
The online claims form repeatedly produced errors.
The chatbot couldn’t route my issue, and even the live agent was blocked by system dependencies.
Ultimately, the only effective channel was the in-store channel, indicating that the digital ecosystem was not designed with real CX resilience in mind.
This wasn’t a single failure. It was a chain reaction: When one touchpoint breaks, the entire experience breaks.
What This Breakdown Reveals
Several themes emerged from this journey that I see repeatedly across industries:
1. CX Ownership Is Fragmented
The carrier’s website, manufacturer claims process, verification systems, chatbot, and in-store operations were clearly built and owned by different teams. The customer is the only one who has to navigate the entire ecosystem.
2. Digital Solutions Often Fail Without Cross-Functional Alignment
A chatbot is only as strong as the operational design behind it. Authentication is only as effective as its contingency paths. Websites are only helpful if they reflect the actual process.
3. Strong CX Means Reducing Touchpoints, Not Increasing Them
Research shows that excellent customer experience reduces the number of interactions needed to meet a customer’s goal. When customers must escalate from digital to live support to physical locations, your strategy is not optimized.
4. One Breakdown Can Create Long-Term Business Risk
Churn, lost loyalty, negative sentiment, and reputational harm often start with one moment of friction. A customer doesn’t need multiple bad experiences; one can be enough.
Why CX Requires a Cross-Functional Strategy
Every function contributes to the customer’s progression through the journey. Yet most organizations only measure and improve the pieces they individually “own.” This narrow approach creates:
Misaligned priorities
Conflicting processes
Shallow insights
Missed risks
CX strategies that look strong in a boardroom but fail in real life
A seamless customer experience requires alignment across process, policy, design, technology, data, people, and operations; not just customer service improvements.
Companies that understand this outperform those that don’t.
How I Help Organizations Close the Gaps
I work with executives and cross-functional leaders to uncover the unseen breakdowns in their customer journeys. Such breakdowns don’t show up in dashboards but do in customer sentiment, support volume, churn patterns, and operational inefficiencies.
My approach focuses on three core questions:
Where is the journey breaking down today?
What is driving the breakdown structurally, operationally, culturally, or technologically?
What cross-functional strategy will prevent the breakdown from recurring?
Every client engagement is designed around their environment. I don’t offer generic playbooks or one-size-fits-all roadmaps. Modern CX challenges require more nuance than that.
Final Thought
My replacement phone experience was inconvenient, but it was also a reminder:
CX is not a single moment. It is the connective tissue across the entire customer journey.
Suppose organizations want to strengthen loyalty, reduce friction, and retain customers in moments that matter. In that case, they must treat CX as a cross-functional discipline and not a reactive function or a set of disconnected improvements.
The companies that recognize this are the ones that lead.
Those who ignore it often feel its impact when it’s too late.
If your organization is experiencing customer friction, internal misalignment, or inconsistent journeys, I help teams uncover the underlying causes and build CX strategies that are scalable, cross-functional, and grounded in your business realities.
If you're ready to transform customer experience into a competitive advantage, let’s talk.