Total CX

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.

Operations Does Have Clout!
Who does have clout (and budget) in most organizations? The actual product line P&Ls, of course. They’re each responsible for generating their own revenues and profits. The sales executives within those P&Ls typically have the most clout as the premier revenue generators. Or the people who conceive of, design, develop, and deliver the firm’s products and services may have the most clout. But, besides P&L leaders, who gets to spend money and carry out major initiatives for the company as a whole?

There’s usually a company-wide, or at least region-wide, Operations group, typically headed by a Chief Operating Officer. Recently, we’ve also noticed an increase in the number of “Strategic Planning and Operations” groups within large organizations. These SP&O groups are chartered with executing on strategic intent. These Operations groups are typically led by executives with vision, clout, and budgets that are large enough to tackle company-wide initiatives and/or to sponsor pilot projects within P&Ls that may spread to other groups.

CX Execs Should Migrate to Operations
If you’re a customer experience leader who feels powerless to do anything other than report the news and to try to herd your execs in a more customer-friendly direction, look for a better place to hang your hat. Check out your Operations group. See if that might be a better fit.

CX Execs Should Gain Control of OpEx Spending
What’s the best way to get clout? Control the budget. Don’t ask for more money. You won’t get it. But DO ask to have the ability to PRIORITIZE up to 10% of your company’s operational expenditures across product lines, touchpoints, and functional areas. Each P&L might submit items for your consideration, or you could use the funds to sponsor customer-impacting infrastructure improvements that won’t get done any other way.

CX Execs Should Lead Customer-Impacting Business Process Redesign Efforts
When you streamline customers’ critical scenarios, you discover that your customers’ processes for getting things done inevitably cross your organization’s internal and external boundaries. Who better to lead both the customer co-design and the prioritized execution of customer-adaptive business processes than you, the CX leader?

CX Execs Should Set Operational Metrics for Customer-Impacting Issues
A lot of the levers that a CX executive should have include customers’ success metrics that can be translated into internal operational metrics—e.g., reduce the time and the number of steps it takes for a customer to be productive with your software, or to be enjoying driving her new car, or to be making money from her reallocated financial portfolio.

So, if you are a frustrated (or a wannabe) Customer Experience executive, or if you’re part of a company that seems to be struggling to deliver on customer experience priorities, take a closer look at what a CX executive’s role should be. Think about the role and the person assigned to it. Look at how your organizational structure helps or hinders your collective efforts to make it easy for your customers to get things done and to do business with you.

Key Role: SVP of Customer Experience (or Equivalent)
Roles and Responsibilities You’ll Need for Your Customer-Centric Organization
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, July 28, 2011

Turning Customer Insights into Action

During our 20 plus years of using our Customer Scenario© Mapping methodology with clients and their customers, we’ve learned a lot. The methodology is constantly evolving, often based on suggestions and innovations from clients and customers. Early on in our use of the methodology, we and our clients, were often frustrated by the inability of turning the customer input into actions and results in any timely fashion. The barriers to quickly identifying and delivering new and improved products, services, and experiences to help prospects and customers reach their outcomes include (but aren’t limited to):

• Healthy Skepticism. Can we believe what we just heard or do we need to do more research?

• Lack of Cross-Organizational Alignment.

• Inability to Make a Compelling Business Case.

• No Precise Way to Measure Results.

• No Influence over Resource Prioritization Decisions.

To help overcome these barriers, about five years ago we refined our approach with a technique we now call the Operational Debrief, and we use it to build cross-organizational consensus around customer metrics, operational metrics, key enablers, business case hypotheses, recommendations, and action items. The methods included in the Debrief are valuable for any customer-facing initiative, whether you use our methodology or one of your own. Over the past few years, we’ve found this technique to be extremely valuable in catalyzing action from customer insights.

Turn Customer Co-Design Insights into Action
How to Gain Momentum by Turning Customer Scenarios® into Operational Scorecards, Recommendations, and Action Items
By Patricia B. Seybold and Ronni T. Marshak, Patricia Seybold Group, May 19, 2011

Give Customer Experience Leaders Authority as well as Responsibility

In Part 3 of the Customers.com Handbook, What Roles You'll Need to Implement Your Customers.com Strategy, Patty stresses the importance of making sure that the role (or roles) that lead the customer experience charge has clout in your organization. Her suggestions for a new customer-centric organizational structure include:

1. Put Your Top Execs in Charge of Customer Experience Governance

2. Give Customer Segment Owners P&L Responsibility

3. Nurture Customer Communities by Customer Segment

4. Drive Company-wide Priorities based on Customer-critical Issues ACROSS Segments

Sound advice. But many organizations have already put people and projects in place that don’t necessarily follow these guidelines.

In our experience with client projects, the most successful co-design and customer innovation initiatives always have high-level executive support. But in those projects that die on the vine (before even getting started) or get stalled after a promising start, the person given the mandate to improve the customer experience is lower down on the corporate totem pole, and doesn't have the unfailing support of the powers that be.

Customer-Centric Initiatives that Never Happen

Getting a customer experience initiative off the ground requires proper scoping of the project and defining valued deliverables, all of which requires deep and thoughtful listening to the sponsor's requirements and ultimate goals. However, a well conceived project doesn't necessarily get approved. This is especially true when the sponsor is below the VP level and isn't responsible for a line of business with the associated P&L. Typically, someone at the C level recognizes that the company should be doing some customer experience programs, and puts the onus on a VP level exec to figure out how to make that happen. The VP looks for someone to take ownership, and often turns to someone at mid level in marketing, who either doesn’t have other specific responsibilities but is a good worker, or someone who has a lot of responsibilities, but makes things happen.

Unfortunately, by the time this customer-experience program leader gathers all the information on what type of project can be done and can be successful, the senior executive has moved on to other priorities and is loath to commit any significant budget to the initiative.