A Departmental Collaboration Guide, your essential resource for understanding and optimising your partnerships across your organisation.

Cross-Function CX Engagement > Legal/Compliance

Legal/Compliance

The Legal and Compliance department is responsible for ensuring the company operates within all applicable legal and regulatory frameworks, managing risk, and defending the company's interests. Their mission is to provide expert counsel and oversight to protect the business, its reputation, and its assets by fostering a culture of integrity and compliance.

Key Goals & Priorities

Mitigate legal, regulatory, and contractual risk across the organisation.
Ensure full compliance with relevant legislation, such as GDPR, consumer rights, and industry-specific regulations.
Provide pragmatic and timely legal advice to support strategic business initiatives.
Manage all corporate contracts, intellectual property, and disputes.
Develop and maintain robust internal policies and controls.

What Legal/Compliance Needs from Customer Experience (CX)

Customer Insights & Feedback: Specific customer feedback that highlights confusion, frustration, or misunderstanding related to our Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy, or other legally-binding communications.
Journey Mapping Contributions: Customer journey maps that clearly identify touchpoints with legal implications, such as account sign-up, data consent prompts, and contract acceptance, to provide context on the customer's mindset.
Advocacy for Customer Needs: A partnership approach where CX advocates for fairness and transparency in customer policies, making the case that clear, simple terms build trust and reduce the long-term risk of disputes.
Process Improvement Suggestions: A "no surprises" approach, bringing new CX initiatives, marketing campaigns, or communication strategies to Legal for review early in the development process, not just before launch.
Data & Analytics: Data on customer disputes or complaints that stem from policy or contract misunderstandings, helping Legal to identify and address areas of recurring friction or risk.

How CX Can Engage & Collaborate Effectively

Regular Communication Channels: Establish a clear process for seeking legal review on customer-facing materials and initiatives. Treat the Legal team as a key stakeholder from the project outset.
Joint Initiatives & Projects: Collaborate on a project to rewrite customer terms and conditions or the privacy policy into plain, accessible English. CX can provide input on clarity and user comprehension, while Legal ensures legal soundness.
Data Sharing & Reporting: Provide Legal with anonymised but specific examples of customer issues that arise from legal language, helping them to see the real-world impact of their documents.
Cross-Functional Training/Workshops: Invite members of the Legal team to journey mapping workshops to build their empathy for the customer. In return, ask Legal to provide training for customer-facing teams on crucial topics like data handling under GDPR or what can be said during a service dispute.
Attending Their Meetings: Offer to join meetings where new customer-facing policies are drafted to provide real-time input on how the language and terms will be perceived by customers.
Active Listening & Empathy: Understand that Legal's primary function is to protect the company from risk. Frame requests collaboratively: "We want to achieve this positive customer outcome. How can we work together to do it in a way that is fully compliant and minimises risk?"

Key CX Touchpoints & Intersections

Acceptance of Terms & Conditions at sign-up.
Privacy Policies and cookie consent banners.
Customer contracts and Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Handling of customer data and GDPR-related requests (e.g., Subject Access Requests).
The formal dispute resolution process.
Language used in billing and collections communications.

Success Metrics (Shared or CX Impacted)

Reduction in customer complaints/disputes related to terms or policies.
Improved customer comprehension of legal communications.
Efficiency and speed of resolving customer-related legal matters.
Zero fines or regulatory actions related to customer data or consumer rights.

Questions to Consider for Collaboration

"How can we build a proactive relationship with Legal to make compliance a seamless part of our design process, rather than a final hurdle?"
"How can we translate complex legal necessities into simple, transparent, and trustworthy communications that enhance the customer experience?"
"What recurring customer issues signal a potential ambiguity in our legal terms that we should address together?"

Google Sites

Report abuse