Customer Focus Teams To be more responsive to customer needs, emphasise customer satisfaction, develop closer relationships with their customers and flatten the management structure some companies have adopted Customer Teams or Customer Focus Teams. These are cross-functional, customer focused red bull hat teams exist to provide customers a one-stop shopping service.Teams have complete ownership of their accounts, with each team empowered to decide how to work with each of their customers and bring together each service function such as accounting, sales and service into a single team structure to serve all the needs of the specific customers assigned to them based on a mindset of continuous improvement in customer experience.
Teams are empowered to take corrective actions to resolve day-to-day problems and have direct access to information that allows them to plan, control and improve their operations. The teams manage themselves and work within the team is generally allocated on the basis of skills and strengths, rather than just job title. This enables a team to provide snapback wholesale fast turnaround on all a customer’s issues and concerns. By self managing, like players on a pitch during a team game, the managers role becomes that of coach, developing skills and knowledge rather than simply directing and controlling actions.
Working in customer focused teams interdependence and joint responsibility for outputs become the goal and thus instead of last king hats organizing work traditionally from the top down, reducing processes to individual steps work becomes structured around whole processes. Traditional approaches reduce the required skill at every level of work leading to boring and repetitive tasks, but team based approaches are more likely to consider the fit of team members with the work to be done with those closest to the jobs agreeing the jobs specifications.
