Customer Experience Leadership
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Feb 18, 2010
Customers want consistently excellent experiences with your organization, which is blessed with many dedicated employees who live for the customer. Unfortunately, this bottom-up passion for providing great customer service only takes you so far. Different departments have competing objectives, metrics and motivations. It's the curse of the silo, as Jeanne Bliss describes in her book, Chief Customer Officer.
Each silo builds performance standards limited to that area. Inside a silo, an employee gets success from specialization and compartmentalization. Squeaky wheels get priorities over oiling the gears: addressing high-profile problems takes precedence over making systemic improvements. As a result, the needs of the silo are often in conflict with the needs of other groups.
Your organization is not alone in this. In most firms, departments do not work together naturally as a team to best serve the customer, yet such teamwork is essential to collaboratively deliver consistent customer experience.
To truly design customer experiences requires top-down driven collaboration, which is why your organization needs dedicated customer-experience leadership. In fact, companies with highly loyal customers are more likely to have senior management commitment to customer experience, according to our CE IQ study.
Jeanne Bliss has been the customer-experience leader at Lands End, Coldwell Banker, Allstate, Microsoft and Mazda, and she has literally written the book on the subject, Chief Customer Officer. For more of her insights, we encourage you to attend Vovici Vision 2010, where she will be delivering a keynote.
Your employees want to do their best to serve customers - but they need a champion who can help cut through the organizational red tape to facilitate the delivery of great customer experiences.