Customer Experience Comes of Age!
Posted by Nancy Porte on Tue, Jun 21, 2011
Over the past five years, there has been a burgeoning of customer experience professionals in both B2B and B2C organizations. There are 4,656 LinkedIn groups that result from a search for “customer”. Narrow the search to “customer experience” and you still find 463 groups to join!
Customers want consistently excellent experiences with your organization which is, arguably, 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. To truly design customer experiences requires top-down driven collaboration, which is why many organizations have taken the next step by dedicating customer experience leadership. Titles vary from ‘Chief Customer Officer’ to ‘Vice President of Member Experience’. The exact responsibilities may vary, but the goal is the same - grow the business by nurturing customer loyalty.
The results of a recent Temkin Group survey of 394 people, who identified themselves as customer experience professionals, found some interesting information about this new group:
- The largest group of professionals (29 percent) belongs to a centralized customer experience organization. The remaining come from different parts of the company, with largest numbers in customer service (22 percent) and marketing (20 percent).
- More than three quarters of respondents list voice of the customer programs within their set of responsibilities. Not far behind are customer insight analysis, change management, and cultural change.
- A whopping 98 percent of respondents agree with the statement “customer experience is a great profession to be in,” but only 70 percent are satisfied with their opportunities for professional advancement.
- About two thirds of respondents believe that their company’s customer experience efforts have had a positive impact on their business in 2010.
According to Paul Hagan, Principal Analyst for Forrester Research, who wrote a report called The Rise of the Chief Customer Officer, just over 80% of CCOs have spent two years or less in the position and 55% have one year or less on the job. The majority of them are internal hires who have a significant history at their companies. A third of the CCOs previously held Division President or GM roles, and almost as many worked in a marketing and/or sales position. About one quarter of these CCOs formerly held operations positions.
To support this new profession a new organization, Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), has been formed by customer experience veterans, Bruce Temkin and Jeanne Bliss. There is a lot of buzz in the industry around the awareness, networking opportunities and professional development this association will provide. It’s mission is described as "...a global, non-profit organization that supports the professional development of its members by enhancing networking, providing research and education, establishing standards, promoting the industry, and creating a better understanding of the discipline of customer experience.”
While customer experience is growing as a profession, there are still challenges to be met. Debate continues on whether the customer experience organization should be part of operations, marketing or be completely independent. Most marketing departments are focused on customer acquisition while operations deliver on the brand promise. Changes in the delivery process will cut across departments, so a key requirement of the CCO is knowledge of internal processes and the respect of the teams that may have to change in order to improve those processes. For these reasons, it is often decided that the CCO is independent and a peer to the leaders of the marketing and operations groups.
Another challenge is establishing corporate patience for return on investment (ROI). Setting a strategic mandate for the program is required as it will provide support for the customer experience team as it builds the infrastructure for collecting feedback, translating data to actionable insights and making the resulting process changes. But even the most effective program will require time to create buy-in and produce change towards a customer-centric culture.
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. And, as my team’s champion, I recognize the true customer experience professionals are the passionate front-line team members – customer service, account management, consultants and trainers – who serve customers daily! Let the “real” customer experience professionals in your organization know their time has come and they are valued!