With brands today recognizing the importance of customer experience, it has become crucial for one person or entity to have a stronghold on the entire customer journey in order to provide a seamless and intuitive customer experience. And nobody is better positioned to do that than the CMO.
Due to the pandemic, customer experience has received ample attention from the board, making it critical for brands to focus on digitalization. Though customer experience is now being recognized as critical to a brand’s success, many companies are unsure who should be in charge of it. In most cases, multiple owners are tasked with developing CX for their own purposes, such as customer service, customer success, sales, marketing and much more. Since each department has a hand in the customer experience, it feels less intuitive.
Managing end-to-end customer experience has become one of the biggest challenges for today’s brands to effectively address. When more people and departments take ownership of it, the customer experience journey tends to become more complex.
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When CX doesn’t have a clear owner
No Seamless experience: When there is no single entity or owner behind the CX strategy, the customer experience will become more disjointed as the prospect moves further down the funnel. Moreover, it has also become difficult to truly examine the impact of end-to-end customer experience and provide guidance on how to enhance it.
Not having insights: When numerous departments manage CX for their own function, the customer insights are not shared or assimilated into a broader CX strategy. This results in one area developing more quickly while another lags behind. Customers need to feel as if they are interacting with a single brand throughout their journey, regardless of where, when, or with whom they engage. Without shared customer visibility and data across teams, brands will be unable to build this experience.
Unified improvement: Improving customer experience is a never-ending process. Hence, brands should not only focus on creating unique experiences, they should also react and respond when their competitors offer something better or when the needs and expectations of their customers shift. If there’s no single owner in place, it becomes impossible to be creative and agile when responding in a way that takes the whole into account.
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But why should the CMO own CX?
The first and the most important reason is that no one else is better positioned than the CMO when it comes to the core of CX. As marketing is a customer’s first point of contact and therefore as the first owner of the customer experience, they have a better understanding of what the customer wants throughout the customer journey.
Additionally, CMOs have an early pulse on the customer and can build on that insight by integrating technology across marketing, sales and support channels. They understand how all of the components fit together and can assist in identifying areas for improvement. They also understand metrics and how to link CX performance to revenue.
Any CMO who is responsible for the entire end-to-end customer experience cannot function in silos. They need to involve every CX voice across the enterprise, including those who don’t have direct customer engagement, such as logistics and HR, to ensure that everyone is on the same page. The goal for the CMO is to take ownership of the leadership role — and therefore the ultimate decisions — rather than to implement new initiatives without critical input from both internal and external stakeholders.
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