Customer Journey Intelligence: The Secret to Cross-Functional Alignment in Retail
To stay competitive in the retail space, teams must have better cross-functional alignment. Many teams, however, operate in silos and have a fragmented perspective of the customers’ journey. Research conducted by Harvard Business Review found that 67% of collaboration failures are due to silos.
Retailers who don’t monitor for misalignment and fail to deliver quick solutions risk impacting business performance, resulting in revenue loss, missed opportunities, inconsistent customer experience, inventory and supply chain issues, operational inefficiency, increased customer churn, and can significantly impact decision-making.
Let’s explore the benefits of this approach.
The Key Challenges Retail Leaders Face
To understand the benefits of customer experience benchmarking, it's important to know the key challenges teams are confronted with:
When internal teams are misaligned, employee engagement and retention are negatively impacted.
Without alignment, team communication crumbles leading to conflicting priorities and the potential of a toxic work environment.
Misaligned teams have different sets of objectives, KPIs, and priorities to focus on. For example, the Head of Retail Operations would focus more on cost control while the VP of CX would focus on improving services.
Without a “single source of truth”, teams have conflicting strategies and KPIs. For example, marketing teams measure success through campaign engagement while sales teams focus on the total revenue generated per customer. The lack of a unified view implies that the organization cannot accurately ascertain the impact of team contributions.
To address these challenges, retail teams must have more consolidated insights that also encourage closer collaboration.
Cross-Functional Alignment: The Benefits Created by Unified and Objective Insights
The strategic implementation of customer experience benchmarking helps establish a common language among the different teams and creates a shared understanding of the customers’ needs.
This initiative delivers impartial, data-driven feedback that teams can trust. With this type of information, silos break down and priorities align across business functions.
Research suggests that retailers who benchmark their customer experience performance can identify issues and implement best practices, resulting in better outcomes.
The HappyOrNot 2025 Retail CX Insights Report indicates that global in-store retail CX scores usually average 91.8%, with the best-performing reaching scores of 95.9%. Teams who leverage these insights and apply them to their operations have seen considerable improvements in customer retention and loyalty.
Remember that shopping insights are applicable to every facet of what retail teams do. Once these insights are shared and reviewed, they illustrate how each team’s work impacts the overall customer journey.
This creates shared understanding and accountability among teams, leading to alignment, reducing internal politics, and encouraging data-driven decision-making.
Customer experience benchmarking also delivers significant benefits to retail teams such as improved customer satisfaction and loyalty, operational efficiency and performance, and conversion and revenue growth.
At Competitor IQ, our experienced retail consultants create continuous experience evaluation programs designed to gather insights relevant to different teams.
Customer Experience Benchmarking: Creating Stronger Internal Collaboration and Culture
These evaluations also deliver other advantages to retail teams. For example, teams can use customer journey evaluation reports and insights in team meetings to keep priorities aligned, stimulate discussions, tweak strategies and offerings, enhance collaboration, and build consensus around what’s important to customers in their shopping journey.
Regular meetings like this empower employees and help them to feel valued when they see that feedback is fair, actionable, and transparent. This not only boosts morale but also leads to improved retention rates and an engaged, aligned workforce.
Studies also indicate that companies who implement CX benchmarking saw a 25% increase in customer satisfaction, and this can be attributed to the organization’s continuous improvement culture.
The consistent, organization-wide insights delivered by these benchmarking assessments ensure that there’s cross-functional alignment: The marketing team ensures brand promises, match reality in the stores, operations can fine-tune standard operation procedures (SOPs), and customer experience (CX) leaders can close the gap between expectation and what teams deliver.
Drive Better Organizational Alignment and Improve Customer Experience
Top-performing retailers know there’s always room for improvement, and the journey to enhance collaboration between internal teams is an ongoing process.
As mentioned in this article, teams can help to reduce internal friction and close gaps with customer experience benchmarking. These assessments deliver objective, real-world customer journey insights that bring teams together and are a catalyst for a strong internal culture.
This ultimately leads to improved customer experience, a more agile organization, cross-functional alignment, and employee retention.
Are you ready to unite your retail teams around a single source of truth? Drop us a line.