Traditional customer service suffers from predictable department friction. Training departments blame talent acquisition for sending unprepared candidates. Talent acquisition blames training for failing to develop the people they hired. The result? Finger-pointing, defensiveness, and customer experience that suffers while departments protect their territories.
At Support Services Group (SSG), Jenn Dunfee, vice president of global talent development, and Mike Duplessis, vice president of people and talent acquisition, have eliminated this toxic cycle. Instead, they implement department collaboration to ensure customer experience never suffers — and they share accountability if it does.
The two-in-a-canoe philosophy
“I like to think of me and Jenn as two in a canoe paddling upstream,” Mike explains. “If we’re rowing together, it’s a lot easier than fighting each other.”
This isn’t just a nice metaphor — it’s their operational reality. The two leaders meet at least weekly to address pain points and celebrate wins, approaching every challenge as a shared problem requiring shared solutions.
“We have to face some hard truths,” Mike notes, “because if my department is missing a step, then we have to work together to fix it — same for her department.”
What makes their partnership extraordinary isn’t the absence of problems. It’s how they handle them. “You have to leave pride at the door if you get into conversation with me and Jenn,” Mike explains. “We speak very openly and candidly about failures.”
This radical honesty creates a rare dynamic where they can be critical of each other’s departments without creating hurt feelings or defensiveness. “Most of the time we end the call laughing about the solutions and how we got into a specific place,” Mike adds.
Jenn sees this as fundamental to SSG’s competitive advantage: “We’re able to have those conversations and call out those pain points and not get our feelings hurt, which allows us to move to the next step and solution.”
Their collaboration philosophy centers on shared ownership rather than individual department metrics. When training identifies agents struggling with specific skills, they don’t just send feedback to talent acquisition — they work together to understand whether it’s a hiring issue, training gap, or process problem.
“We find ourselves more often than not coming together to say, ‘Here’s our hiccup. How are we going to fix it?'” Jenn explains. “We have to make sure we do it together, because if we don’t, then we’re going to be back in the same spot.”
This approach transforms potential conflicts into collaborative problem-solving sessions. Instead of protecting departmental interests, both leaders prioritize the end result: agents prepared to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Jenn believes their partnership approach differentiates SSG in the marketplace: “At the end of the day, we have to make sure that our departments are aligned, because the next step is passing them to operations. The fact that we’re able to have those conversations allows us to move forward.”
The differentiator impact
When department collaboration is successful, the benefits compound throughout the organization. Candidates receive more accurate expectations during recruiting because training insights inform hiring conversations. Training programs address real capability gaps because talent acquisition provides honest feedback about candidate preparation levels.
The result isn’t just internal efficiency; it’s customer experience that reflects seamless organizational alignment — rather than departmental handoff friction. Want to see this synergy in action? Reach out to us today to see for yourself the positive impact of operational alignment on customer experience.
