Customer Experience is not a single person without budget

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    • Where Should CX Sit at the Table?

    Before we begin talking about where CX should sit in the organization, let’s clarify one thing. Customer Experience team structure is not a single person. 

    A company cannot hire one customer experience professional and expect that within a year, they will have a customer-centric culture in place. CX also is not a team that has no visibility and no budget. No one has ever heard of a successful transformation without extensive change management. Nor has one heard of a successful transformation without vision and strategy. CX requires individuals and teams with cross functional workshops, new products and processes and heavy communications across the organization.

    A customer experience team requires leadership support to deliver across the organization. So, where in the organization should CX sit? Leadership teams across industries and geographies are trying different sub-optimal approaches.

    IT

    Last year a non-profit health insurance company in New York approached me to ask for feedback on their CX set up. They were planning to place the CX team under the CIO. Since the corporate staff was not large, the role of CX would have been fairly elevated. Still, I advised against that organizational structure.

    A customer experience transformation cannot be led by IT for several reasons. Although the world today is more and more digital, brands still are in the business of making human, long lasting connections with customers that will drive more sales. Our IT partners are excellent at executing programs and can definitely help with the UX part of the job. However, they are not marketers or operators. 

    Asking IT to drive CX is simply not the right choice. There is no doubt that CX cannot exist without IT. But that does not mean IT needs to lead it.

    Marketing

    Marketing (or in some organizations “product”) is the most common set up for CX in brands’ corporate organizations. Media and consumer goods companies usually take this approach.  At first look, it makes sense to set CX in marketing. After all, the purpose of CX is to deliver on the brand promises that marketing makes.

    This could almost work, if brands did not bury my CX peers deep down in the organization so they turn into journey mapping documentation gatherers with no real impact.

    One fast food brand in Europe actually had the role of Head of Brand Engagement under the CMO and then had four other leaders reporting to that role, one of which was the CX Director. That CX Director was competing with the other three directors with similar roles for a piece of the authority pie.  This equates to giving someone a problem to solve without tools to do so.

    HR

    One Financial Services institution in the US had arguably the least impactful set up. They put CX under HR! Please, do not mix customer experience with HR. True, we talk about the importance of employee engagement to the successful delivery of exceptional brand experiences. Although happy employees and customer-centric culture are requirements for a CX-driven organization, CX is much more than HR.

    For a CX group to have impact and drive change, it needs to be in the customer facing part of the organization. Customer experience professionals need access to the customer to learn what is working and what is not. They need access to the operations to change processes and procedures. Lastly, CX professionals need tools like IT and Marketing to deliver new solutions and communicate those solutions to the customer. HR offers none of those enablers to a CX transformation.

    Customer Experience Team Structure

    An organization that is really committed to putting the customer at its center will build (reorg) the governance structure to reflect that commitment. That means having a Customer Experience Executive that has all the customer facing divisions under him/her and funding this organization appropriately.

    If that means taking funding from other parts of the organization, so be it. As a brand, this signals to both the investors and the employees that a real shift of the corporate mindset is taking place. With that setup, customers feel the change and reciprocate with loyalty. To deliver exceptional customer experience, this is the way to do it – not by hiring one person and burying him/her in the org with no seat at the table, just to check off a mark.

    Build a Stronger Customer Experience Team Structure

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    Liliana Petrova

    Published on 03/05/2018

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