Outside Innovation

Why Customer Experience Shouldn’t Report to Marketing

For some time now, I’ve been conscious of the built-in “gotcha” that is diluting the impact of many customer experience initiatives. Your customer experience leader may have a well-designed customer experience and/or customer advocacy program. He or she may have “support” from your CEO. But does he or she actually have the purview to execute? Does she have the budgetary and political clout to actually design and carry out initiatives that will improve the Quality of Customer Experience your firm delivers?

Does she have purview to prioritize and to fund initiatives across interaction touchpoints, distribution channels, internal organizational silos, including IT infrastructure projects? Or does your customer experience “leader” simply gather Voice of the Customer (VOC) insights and oversee customer surveys and then report the results back to anyone who will listen?

Most customer experience executives reside in their company’s marketing organizations. They are supposed to worry about the end-to-end experience customers have when interacting with your brand. If she is really good, and well-respected, she may help drive priorities for some of the business process, policy, and/or IT improvements the company needs to make. But most of the CX leaders I’ve spoken with admit to feeling powerless, discouraged, and underwhelmed by the actual changes anyone in the company is really willing to make. “If only we could take action faster,” they lament. “It takes forever to convince people to make the changes they know we need to make.”

I hate to say it, but in most companies and industries, marketing has no clout. Marketing has a budget that it uses to maintain the Web site, do customer research, generate leads, and build brand awareness. Marketing measures its success based on leads generated, conversion rates, and the strength of the brand. The customer experience group housed within marketing measures its success based on customer loyalty scores and customer survey results, as well as how well the company ranks in various channel-specific customer experience audits.

Join Peter Senge and Mwalimu Musheshe at MIT on May 15th!

Peter Senge is hosting a "bring your own lunch" talk at MIT where Mwalimu Musheshe, the Chairman of the Uganda Rural Development Training Programme (URDT) will be the featured speaker. Musheshe uses many of the principles of systems thinking in his amazing work at URDT. This is going to be a fantastic open discussion and dialogue. Here's the "invitation" to the event, thanks to Bryan Smith, one of the co-authors of Peter's latest book, The Necessary Revolution. (I hope they'll get into a topic about how environmentally sustainable URDT itself is. Perhaps I'll ask that question!).                                                                                        

Mwalimu Musheshe                                                           Peter Senge 

Vision in Action

Mwalimu Musheshe, Co-founder and Chairman
Uganda Rural Development &
Training Program (URDT)

Hosted by Peter Senge

MIT Sloan School of Management
Friday, May 15, 12-2
MIT Tang Building/E51, 70 Memorial Drive, Room 345.

This event is FREE.  You're invited to bring your own lunch.

Come meet Mwalimu Musheshe, co-founder and chairman of URDT. Learn about their visionary, systemic approach to development in Uganda – a model for Africa and the world. URDT provides an aspiration-based, systemic approach grounded in the understanding that to achieve lasting development, people must become empowered in all areas of their lives, including education, health, economic self-reliance, human rights, and civic participation. Since its inception, URDT has helped thousands of people improve their lives and has received accolades from international organizations for its innovative approaches. URDT’s training of local people, especially women, to become leaders and creators, is changing the way rural communities work. Musheshe will be presenting and engaging in dialogue with participants in this session, hosted by Peter Senge.  More information about URDT is at: http://www.urdt.net/

A map to the location can be viewed here:

URDT and ARU: CREATING PROSPERITY IN RURAL UGANDA

KAGADI--BOOM TOWN IN THE WILDERNESS

After a five-hour drive from Kampala, the last three hours on bone-jarring, deeply-rutted dirt roads which are only passable because the rainy season has not yet begun, you reach the frontier boom town of Kagadi. Like any frontier town, this one swirls with dust as vehicles come and go, with people picking up supplies, bringing family members to the 100-bed hospital, dropping neighbors off at the bus stop. In Kagadi today, you can get your cell phone, radio, bicycle, or motorbike repaired, buy food, clothes and shoes, buy agricultural and building supplies, buy furniture for your home, buy beer and soda, eat at a restaurant, or stay in a local hotel. Since my last visit in March of 2006, power poles and wires have finally reached Kagadi town, but no electricity is being delivered yet.

This is the way Kagadi looks today. Although located 3 hours via dirt road from the nearest city, this town has grown since 1987 from one street with three stores to a bustling town, complete with electricity, a 100-bed hospital, and an Internet café.

GLOBAL APPLICATIONS OF CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN: EMPOWERING VILLAGERS IN RURAL AFRICA

I just returned from a two-week visit to the campus of the Uganda Rural Development and Training (URDT) programme and of the brand new and quite revolutionary African Womens’ University (ARU) for which I am one of the few non-African Council members.

It seems fitting on International Womens’ Day to celebrate the hope and creativity that these young women bring to their communities in rural Africa. This is the first all-women’s university in East Africa. But what is even more important are the nature of its hand-picked students, the nature of its curriculum, and the impact these students are already making in their first year of study.

Photo: Six of the first-year ARU Students: from left to right: Madrene Nabukenya, Flavia Nambooze,  Resty Namubiru, Apophia Kyomukama, Eunice Kyalikunda, Doreen Kasangaki, Betty Kauma Namukaba (RIP).