Customer Focused Teams
To be more responsive to customer needs, emphasize 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 teams that exist to provide customers a one-stop shopping service.
Ownership
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 of the needs of the specific customers assigned to them based on a mindset of continuous improvement in the 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 fast turnaround on all of a customer’s issues and concerns. By self managing, like players on a pitch during a team game, the manager’s 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 organizing work traditionally from the top down and 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 and agreeing to the job’s specifications.
The advantages of ownership and self management include customers being more comfortable knowing who they will deal with, and teams gaining in-depth knowledge of the needs of each customer. Because of improved internal communications, team members understand the customer’s expectations and share information realizing there is no advantage in hoarding knowledge as their pay will be affected by their customer’s results on their own company’s profitability.
Self Management
Self managing teams do not just happen and they are not an easy answer. Teams go through several stages on their way to self-management and it can take two or more years to achieve this objective. Comprehensive training in basic management skills such as problem solving and decision making is critical as is functional cross training, so they can manage their own processes.
To fully realize their potential, teams need not only to be cross-functional but also need to be managed by entrepreneurial and experienced managers who understand that they exist to provide greater profitability for their company by providing better customer experience to their company’s clients or customers and to this end support and drive team initiatives.
Teams also must not become customer silos rather than functional silos and must work on sharing policies, systems, processes, and people so that the results of winning teams – those that provide increased customer satisfaction together with superior profitability and increasing volume are quickly tested and replicated elsewhere. To achieve this, senior management needs to fine tune structure, roles, processes, and systems to meet the ever-changing needs and increasing complexity of both the customer’s business and their own.
Senior management also has to set the tone and reality–teams exist to provide greater profitability for their company by providing better customer experience to their company’s clients or customers.
To achieve these corporate goals teams must: