I Own My Own Experiences

It’s a question that has plagued the CRM industry for about as long as CRM technology has existed: Who actually owns the customer experience? We attempt to tackle this issue in one of this month’s features, “Who Owns the Customer Experience.” 

The feature raises a number of possible owners, including marketing, sales, the contact center, the IT department, and even a new c-level executive known as the chief customer officer or chief customer experience officer. It also introduces the possibility that no one department should have exclusive responsibility for the customer experience.

This last scenario makes a lot of sense today. After all, if the customer is unhappy and stops buying from the company, the pain extends into every department. Sales takes an immediate hit when quotas are missed and revenue streams dry up, which means that marketing has to work twice as hard to attract new customers. With less revenue on the books, companies institute hiring freezes, which not only affect the HR department but extend throughout the entire company. Companies put new technology upgrades on hold, which sends ripples from the IT department into every office or department. Contact center agents have to field more contacts from more customers with more complex problems, adding stress to human and automated processes and systems that are already stretched to the maximum. Budgets get cut, raises are put on hold, benefits are clawed back, employee morale takes a plunge, and attrition isn’t far behind.

With so much at stake, can—or more important, should—one person have all this responsibility? Is it really fair to credit one person when things go right, or to place all the blame on one person when things go wrong? After all, the customer frustration could stem from a single breakdown at any number of departments. A new product design could fail to correct a long-standing defect. A marketing campaign could have missed the mark. The website could have locked out a customer or prevented him from adding an item to his shopping cart. Shipping could have sent the wrong item. Billing could have mistakenly tacked on an extra charge. The AI agent could have misrouted the customer call into the contact center to the wrong agent or department. An email or social media post could fall through the cracks.

It’s all way more than just one individual can handle. And across most companies, department silos, misaligned priorities, disconnected systems, and fragmented data would make a single owner unlikely if not impossible.

So who, then, owns the customer experience? In my opinion, the customer does. In each scenario above, customers are the ones calling the shots. Customers decide whether they like new product designs. Customers decide whether ads spur them to action. Customers decide whether to hit the submit button on e-commerce sites. Customers decide how much they want to pay for products. Customers decide whether to reach out to customer service, over which channels they want to communicate, how much information they are willing to share, and whether the agents’ suggested resolutions are satisfactory. Customers ultimately decide whether to attack companies on social media, whether to answer survey requests, whether to renew their subscriptions, and whether to keep buying the same brands over and over again.

Regardless of the type of business you’re in, if you really want to know how your company is doing, ask your customers. Analytics can only provide so much insight. Data can be misinterpreted or skewed. Stock market reports don’t reflect buyer sentiment. Competitive benchmarks only show what others in your market are doing right, not necessarily what your company is doing wrong. Your management teams likely only know what’s going on it the departments under their purview. And quality assurance metrics only go so far.

Customer obsession has been an industry buzzword for a long time, but in practice, it’s far from the mainstream. That needs to change. Customers truly own the customer experience. While organizations can try to manage and influence customer experiences, it is ultimately customer’s perceptions and emotional connections to brands that dictate their loyalty and retention. Customers are already in the driver’s seat, and it’s time for companies to realize that and act accordingly.

Leonard Klie is editor of CRM magazine. He can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.