Restructure for Results: Improve Your Customer Experience by Restructuring Your Organization

By Kelly Taylor

No matter whether you’re a mortgage lender or servicer, a strong customer relations strategy lays the foundation for continued success in the any industry. A comprehensive and customized experience is what turns a one-time exchange into a longstanding partnership. Unfortunately, many businesses struggle to maintain meaningful relations with B2B customers, especially when attempting to sell across multiple product and service lines. The key to a well-established client relations strategy is integrating it throughout every facet of your organization, starting from the first point of contact—sales. Reworking your organizational sales structure will not only create a more collaborative culture within your business, but it will also create a seamless experience for your customers.

Reorganizing your sales structure can seem like a massive—and controversial—undertaking. However, it can be painless to implement if you work in small steps and maintain transparency from start to finish. As is in any business, the key to success lies with your people, not your product. Recruiting and retaining the best talent is a necessary precursor for the steps below to truly impact the effectiveness of your cross-selling strategy, and subsequently, your customers’ experience.

The key steps to improving your customer satisfaction through reorganizing your sales structure are:

1. Establish Subject Matter Experts throughout your organization: Addressing client pain points through solutions selling is a nuanced effort and will only work if the sales team can speak to customers in their language. Define subject matter experts, or SMEs, who can truly speak to an individual product or service. The SME can be anyone in the organization who will provide a new level of service to customers and function more as a consultant than a sales team member. Their unrivaled product knowledge will allow them to craft solutions for customers that are geared specifically toward their individual businesses. In addition, an SME functions as an accountability leader, responsible for reporting on the metrics – and success – of their individual product or service. SMEs are a valuable part of the customer experience, because clients can reach out to them with any question and know they are getting an answer from the most knowledgeable source.
2. Tear down the silos: Focus your culture on developing an inclusive client experience, and not on the sales of separate business lines. Individual commissions may drive salesmakers, but developing a seamless customer experience is a team effort – especially when selling across several product lines. Addressing customer pain points and potential solutions becomes much easier when the hand-off process from one salesperson to another is fluid and established. Promoting a seamless communication process seems easy enough, but it can be difficult to implement, even when incentivized. Consider developing a small team directly focused on driving leads and customers across the organization. When combined with a strong cultural emphasis on collaboration, this structural change can help take the guesswork out of this essential step for both your sales team and your customers.
3. Build a strong support team that understands the vision: It takes the full support of your organization to efficiently provide customers with an immersive experience. You need to first fully understand how your clients define success within your partnership and what is most important to them – and then make it important to your organization. Ensure that each department has the tools and information they need to be successful in their specific roles. Your marketing team will need flexibility in crafting campaigns geared toward more holistic solutions for specific customer groups. Your client relations team will need to fully understand the facets of every product/service bundle so they can better alleviate problems for customers. Most importantly, a strong support team helps create an environment of consistency for your clients. High-quality interaction along every facet of the purchase journey is what encourages customers to become long-term clients.

Whether you’re in the initial planning stages or revamping an established process, the key point to remember is that the fundamental driver of superb customer relations is getting the organization right. If you build a great platform for your team, they’ll have no problem fulfilling expectations for both you and your customers.