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.
Continue reading "Why Customer Experience Shouldn’t Report to Marketing" »
Recent Comments