What is the role of the Customer Experience Executive?

Companies started formalizing executive roles focused on customer experience about 2-3 years ago. As someone that has operated in the Customer Experience (CE) arena for over 10 years it was great to see the customer experience getting formalized and my hopes for companies using the "voice of the customer" as a serious management tool increased accordingly.  At the time we never really knew how the role was going to play out but it seemed surrounded by good intent.  Unfortunately the SVP/EVP/VP Customer Experience  has rarely lived up to it's promise and now as times get tough the number of Executive's with a "Customer Experience" title that are being let go is increasing almost daily.

The problem I think is that most, if not all customer experience executives operate in a Corporate Group role rather than in the Operating Groups of large companies. The effect this has is that they become responsible for guidance and best practice identification but the have very little power or influence where the rubber hits the road, at the operating groups.  As a result in my experience very few customer experience executives have been able to transfer their excitement and priorities for monitoring and managing the customer experience across to the executives in the operating groups. 

The other factor that has led to the lack of impact a typical customer experience executive has on changing the business is where the budgets are held. Most group level CE executives have a small budget which is focused on addition market research, consultants, etc. However, the budgets needed to truely transform customer experiences are much larger and typically owned by operations or the contact center. As a result most CE executives never get into the real issues around measurement, consistency, systems or behavioral change because they do not have the mandate or resources to affect change.

I am disappointed to see that so many CE exec roles are being cut these day's but I also recognize that the role as it has been used in most companies today is ineffective. The role and responsibilities of a CE exec needs to be revised if they are ever going to impact large organizations. Perhaps the role should sit in the office of the CEO, be an extension of the operations role or operate at the board level similar to an audit or compensation committee?

If you have come across a company where the CE exec does have the influence and resources to make change happen please let me know.

Syed

Comments

[Tak Ishikawa]

Another possible factor for this lack of results is the widespread idea that customer experience improvement is a process of diagnosing and correcting problems. Because of that, most CE executives, managers and supervisors focus their transformative efforts on the bad things (the habits need to be cut) and forget about the good things a company has (the behaviours a company needs to preserve and promote). In my experience, I have seen that customer’s satisfaction don’t change despite a company’s efforts to detect and correct problems, because CE improvement is more about doing more good things, than fewer bad things. In other words, absence of bad incidents doesn’t guarantee a good experience.

By focusing on the positive experiences, identifying the behaviours that led to them, and encouraging staff to repeat those behaviours, companies can drive change more effectively at both the strategic and operative levels. Here is why:

- Customer feedback on good practices is more actionable in the short term than negative information: what a company does right today, no matter how infrequent, can be done more often with few changes in structure, procedures, or platform.
- It is easier to tell people to do things they have already done, than telling them to stop doing things they normally do.
- Desirable habits are perceived as easier to adopt because the behaviour already exists; all you are doing is encouraging people to replicate.
- Since the company is emphasising the good experiences, employees have fewer reasons to play the system and/or hide negative feedback.
- Asking clients to recount their positive experiences enhances their good experience; in contrast, encouraging customers to inform about their bad incidents force them to relive the situation, thus worsening his negative emotions.

Admittedly, this paradigm sounds counterintuitive at first, because it seems to invite companies to ignore their own problems. However, as successful behaviours become more frequent, drawbacks are overcome and customer experience improves.

So, what do your do with bad experiences? Do we just ignore the client that happened to have a bad experience? No. But that is a different topic; please, click on the link and find my answer.
http://kettlesoffish.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/conflict-is-good-for-business

More about this approach to organizational change called Appreciative Enquiry can be found in this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Appreciative-Inquiry-Handbook-2nd-Book/dp/1933403195

[Syed Hasan]

Tak,

Makes a good point and the use of positive feedback is as important if not more important than negative feedback. The challenge for CE exec's is often that they are not operating at the actual "voice of the customer" level, good or bad. They tend to be removed from where the rubber meets the road and also unaware of how technology can be leveraged to achieve their CE goals.