Why The Best CEOs Invest In Customer Experience
Stacy Sherman🎙️📘
Professional Speaker ‣ Author ‣ Advisor. Helping businesses achieve revenue growth & unbreakable loyalty (customers, employees, partners) for lasting success. Instructor @LinkedIn Learning ‣🏆Podcaster: Doing CX Right®
Some companies invest in Customer Experience (CX) as an afterthought. Other brands are 100% focussed on allocating resources to create customer excellence. They purposely establish budgets to build and expand a CX team, and measure customer satisfaction and related KPIs daily. They also close the loop to fix identified customer pain points. These are the companies we know well. We can attribute success to their taking employee and customer experience seriously. Moreover, they deliver on their promises.
Customer-Centric Leaders in Their Own Words
CEOs demonstrate the importance of Doing CX Right. Watch the video below and really listen to the impactful messages from Steve Jobs (Apple), Richard Branson (Virgin), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Tony Hsieh (Zappos), Gary Vaynerchuk (VaynerMedia) and others. I highly recommend showing the video at company meetings. In addition to providing inspiration, it helps you to build a more customer-centric culture by demonstrating the value of investing in customer experience programs.
What I especially like about Michel Falcon's video is it provides examples of how CX contributes to revenue growth, customer loyalty, and employee retention. It's not just a hunch - it's a fact! Hear it directly from the experts👇🏻
The Customer Experience Field Is Booming
Knowing that brands can't compete on price alone anymore and that "CX is a new battlefield" (Gartner), leading Customer Experience has become a popular career path. I consider myself lucky to have "fallen" into a CX role when working at Verizon Wireless. At that time, the terms "VOC" and "CX" were uncommon but that quickly changed. My true passion for customer experience actually happened even before then. It started when I received a package in the mail on a random afternoon. I was not anticipating the delivery of a large box with a label that said, “To Stacy, From Stacy.” You can read my story here.
Driving Customer Excellence Is Not Easy or Quick
Building and maintaining a customer-centric organization takes time. To speed the process, I highly recommend having an executive champion to advocate the importance of delivering customer excellence and reminding employees that everyone owns CX, not one person or team. A customer-first mentality needs to permeate across all departments in the company, from the top to bottom.
A debatable topic is where should a CX team live within an organization. I recently launched a quick Twitter poll to hear the opinions of CX experts. The majority of people believe the CX team should be its own standalone organization, not integrated with Marketing or HR, who leads employee engagement.
What is YOUR opinion? Where does CX fit within your company? I am open-minded to different answers. As long as someone leads CX and ensures there's a lot of cross-team collaboration, then customer satisfaction and loyalty can be attained.
Learn #CX best practices and advance your skills. Visit DoingCXRight.com
*All views expressed are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of or imply the endorsement of employers or other organizations.
Consultant
5yThanks for sharing, Stacy. CX is often the last thing businesses look at because its results are hard to measure. $1 spent = ??? However, CX has such a big impact on the long term sustainability of a business: Better retention, improve lifetime customer value, repeated businesses, warm referrals just to name a few benefits. "It works" just doesn't cut it these days.
Executive VP @ Ipsos | Market Strategy
5yGreat article and video Stacy! In my opinion the CX team should cross all departments in the company. Sales, Marketing, Operations, HR, etc. all need to be thinking about how what they do impacts current and future customers. They should sit right next to the CEO and ensure all departments are CX focused.