How to Assign Responsibility for the Customer Experience - A Practical Idea

In two recent articles I suggested that:

1. While customer experience initiatives seem to be in high demand, they aren’t fully implemented nearly as often as this demand might indicate, and
2. A lot of political squabbles and internal conflicts will be exposed at your company once you make a sincere effort to see your company through the customer’s eyes.

There is, however, yet another nagging issue surrounding the CX issue that we ought to address: 

Who should own the customer experience at your company?

What corporate function should handle designing, managing, and improving your business’s customer experience? Should the ultimate responsibility be the Chief Marketing Officer’s? Or should it fall to the Chief Revenue Officer or the head of sales? Or should Customer Service take responsibility?

Before you answer, let me clarify that for purposes of this discussion we are defining the customer experience as “the totality of a customer’s individual interactions with a brand, over time.”

So what are some activities that would fall within that definition? Here are just a few, in no particular order: 

• Buying the product and putting it to use
• Finding out about the product by interacting on the web site
• Demo-ing the product in a sales meeting
• Complaining about a product’s failure or problem
• Getting the product repaired or serviced
• Submitting a review of the product to your company’s website
• Submitting a review of the product to a third-party website
• Comparing the product to a competitor’s product, feature by feature
• Installing the product and getting it to work the first time
• Submitting financial information prior to purchasing the product
• Having the product upgraded to a newer or better version
• Negotiating the price and terms for the product
• Configuring or re-configuring the product

It’s obvious from this list that the Chief Marketing Officer would be one candidate, although many of these activities would also fall into the Sales area, as well as the Customer Service area, and maybe even Finance (for any credit applications associated with the product or service).

My suggestion, however, is that the best way to assign responsibility for the customer experience at a firm is to divide it into three different tasks:

1. Designing,
2. Managing, and
3. Improving. 

At most companies, the responsibility for designing the ideal CX should almost certainly fall to the CMO, who is also responsible for positioning and promotion, and for all the company’s public representations or messaging about its offerings. Ditto for CX improvement, which is really just a subset of the design task. The key to improving the CX at a company is knowing what direction to move in – that is, what ideal CX design we are trying to achieve?

Managing the CX, however, is not usually a marketing task at all, right? There are service issues that a company’s operations or customer service staff need to address, sales tasks that the sales force needs to manage, and (possibly) credit tasks to be managed by the finance folks. But all these management tasks, no matter who is responsible for them, should be accountable in some way to the standard that is aspired to in the ideal CX design. 

How do these tasks get divided up in your own company?