The "Customer Service" paradox?

I attended an event today which was themed around delivering "amazing" customer service.  The opening speaker talked about general principles and how complaint handling was the biggest driver of perceived customer service. However, the constant references to "The Customer Service Department within your organisation" seemed alien to me. Okay, maybe this is a personal values thing and maybe the fact that as the owner of a small company, I am the Customer Service Department. However, even as an office manager in a large bureaucratic organisation (with a terrible customer service reputation) in the 1990s, I never saw complaints as the CSD's job.  I seemed to be unusual in the organisation as I saw it as the job of all of us to deal promptly and effectively with problems that arise for the people who paid our wages.  Possibly why I left after 3 years there!

So when does an organisation flip from believing that customer service is "everyone's" job to be becoming the preserve of a dedicated department?  Is it an organisational maturity issue where differentiation of different functions is inevitable and a consequence of scale? Or is it a sign of dysfunction, where the pressure to focus "inwards" becomes so intense that the need arises to create a team to do the job of looking "outwards"?

My work takes me to organisations who are looking to implement transformational change, not always or only in the area of customer service but across a whole range of business issues.  The challenge of diverting leader's and employee's attention away from internal issues to focus on the external environment (customers, shareholders, competitors etc.) is never easy but is critical.  Unless those at the heart of the organisation can see, hear and feel what these external perceptions are, real change is very difficult and likely to be denied, avoided and downgraded.

Harvard Business School’s John Kotter, in his great 2008 book “A Sense of Urgency,” blames an insulated culture for organisations inability to sustain their change initiatives and he urges them to “bring the outside in.”  There is a natural tendency for organisations to become too internally focused. Organisations need to listen to their customer-interfacing employees and share external data that will challenge the parochial thinking of internal managers. They also need to send internal people out for exposure to customers or their counterparts in other organisations as well as inviting external perspectives in to the organisation to stimulate different points of view.

It was refreshing later in the presentation where we heard directly from an employee of a local theatre who talked of a job swap programme where employees do at least three one-day job swaps a year in order to build mutual understanding and respect for colleagues and customers.  This seemed to have created a high degree of employee engagement and customer satisfaction for that organisation.

Do you have any examples of "bringing the outside in"?  Maybe you've videoed customers and played them back to employees or even taken employees out to talk with your customers?  It would be great to hear what you have done.