Three Leadership Strategies for CMOs to Promote a CX-Driven Company Culture

By fostering CX culture across all the departments within the organization, business leaders have a better chance of delivering an exceptional customer experience to their customers.

CMOs and marketing departments are often in charge of their company’s customer experience strategy. They continuously strive to enhance the ways in which they can attract and engage customers. They also want to learn about the technologies that will allow them to differentiate their customer experience from that of their competitors. However, this approach often doesn’t work as customer experience doesn’t stay in isolation controlled by the marketing teams.

Context plays a crucial role since the culture of the company and the day-to-day experience of employees determine what kind of experience the customer will have. In fact, according to a 2018 study by IBM, enterprises that scored in the top 25 percent in an employee experience ranking had double the return on sales revenue when compared to enterprises in the bottom quartile. Hence, it is critical that organizations take active efforts to create a customer-centric company culture. Here are three leadership strategies they can adopt to create a customer-centric culture:

Having a clear customer vision

Enterprises should have a customer-centric vision in order to provide an exceptional customer experience. This can enable the organization to have a deeper understanding of their customers, earn and maintain their trust.  However, most organizations fail to translate their high-level leadership strategies into the daily context of their employees. If the employees aren’t convinced and excited about their organization’s vision, it becomes difficult for them to feel the same sense of purpose or strong connection to the goal. Thus, organizations should make it a priority to clearly communicate and involve their employees at every step to truly share their vision with them and achieve their goals.

Also Read: Customer-Centricity Begins with a Superior Employee Experience

Embracing diversity

Customers are a reflection of society, consisting of a diverse range of ethnicities, cultures, and religions. If the workforce of the organization doesn’t reflect such diversity on all levels, how will their employees understand what their customers want, need and expect from them?

Organizations should make it a priority to hire people based on their diversity as well as their skills, as they can provide their unique ideas and perspectives that can enhance the customer experience.

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Empowering employees to strive for customer happiness

Customer experience is not something that can be manufactured via a script or rulebook, and since every customer is different, and every customer interaction has a different context, it is impossible to make customers happy with a fixed script. Additionally, if every special instance or decision requires the approval of a manager, the customer experience ends up becoming slow, frustrating and even unpleasant.

Organizations should take initiatives to empower their employees on all levels to make their own decisions with customer happiness at its centricity. This kind of empowerment in the culture also enables organizations to attract the best talent. Without having rigid rules and hierarchies in place, employees have the freedom to deliver their target to its full extent.

Delivering an exceptional customer experience can help an organization not only boost revenue but can also keep their customers loyal. Companies can successfully lead a CX culture to deliver a delightful experience to their customers by empowering employees to make their own decisions, embedding customer obsession leadership strategies at all levels of the organization and being open to new ideas and perspectives of their diverse workforce.