Domain
Customer-Facing Work
How the team is asked to interact with customers — and the gap between the customer the script imagines and the customer actually on the line.
Customer-Facing Work is the domain in which the team feels the design choices of every other domain at once. Pricing decisions made in finance, policy decisions made in legal, capacity decisions made in operations — they all arrive in the customer-facing team's inbox as a single, irate email.
The architecture is the gap between the authority the customer-facing team is given and the responsibility the customer assumes they have. A support agent who can apologise but can't refund. A salesperson who can promise but can't deliver. An account manager who is the customer's only known contact but is the last to hear about the change.
The fix is rarely more training. The fix is a clearer line of what the customer-facing team can and cannot decide on their own — and the back-channel for getting an answer fast when something falls outside it.
Dr. Tim Hough · ISBN 979-8-9965397-1-0 · Buy the book →
Diagnostic
If your customer-facing people consistently apologise for things they had no part in deciding, and have no way to surface those decisions back to the people who made them, you are looking at a Customer-Facing Work architecture that is absorbing damage instead of redirecting it.
Run the diagnostic
Explore this domain in depth once you have a workspace.
Deep link: /field-guide/customer-facing
Source: Why Your Best People Stop Trying. Dr. Tim Hough.