Connecting the customer experience to the work behind it.

The challenge: one company, different ways of doing business

At Phillips 66, business units had developed separate customer experiences and internal processes. Wholesale fuels and lubricants used different portals. Onboarding was repeated across businesses, and each had its own way of working with finance and credit. Some interactions still depended on email, phone calls, and paper forms.

Customers buying across product lines encountered the company’s internal boundaries. Inside the business, those same divisions made it harder to share information, support common processes, and see how work was progressing.

A common foundation for customers and teams

As Product Owner for Digital Customer Experience, I led a cross-functional program implementing Salesforce Sales, Service, CPQ, Experience, and Commerce Clouds to replace legacy CRMs and customer portals. I also established a Customer Experience practice using Qualtrics XM and embedded Voice of the Customer insights into product and process decisions.

A common platform gave leaders a current view of sales pipeline and performance. Salespeople moving between businesses could use familiar tools, with customer access based on their territory and role. Shared workflows reduced the different processes back-office teams had to support, while digital onboarding replaced forms customers had to print, fill out by hand, and fax back.

Making the next step visible

A credit exception illustrates the approach. A structured Salesforce screen flow could capture the request, route it through the appropriate management approvals, and pass it to the back-office teams responsible for completing the work. Completion signals gave the sales representative a clear basis for updating the customer, with the option to automate that notification.

The longer-term goal was direct integration with credit-system APIs so an approved request could trigger the required action without manual re-entry. That was the next step in the design, rather than a delivered outcome claimed here.

The broader principle

The same need appears throughout an organization: leaders, salespeople, service teams, and analysts need current, relevant information they can trust to make decisions for customers. Moving work out of inboxes and notebooks makes requests, ownership, and progress visible, so the next step does not depend on someone remembering to follow up. A more cohesive customer experience grows from that more connected way of working.