CMO And CXO Must Partner To Transform The Customer Experience

CMO And CXO Must Partner To Transform The Customer Experience

by | Aug 31, 2021 | Digital, Mobile & UX, Guest CX Articles

There’s been much debate about the role of Chief Experience Officers (CXO). A recent Wallstreet Journal article raises questions about whether or not the CXO position will become obsolete. Other publications inform that there is a fast-growing trend of companies hiring CXOs and/or promoting within for the long term, which I’m a fan of.  I can’t predict the future, yet I know for sure that department silos do no one any good. Customer experience and marketing teams must blend and work together regardless of where they sit in an organization.  

Featured Guest Post is by , VP, Principal Analyst~ Forrester

He dives deeper into CXO and CMO topics and the importance of working closely together to achieve both customer and employee brand loyalty.  Thomans original article here.

Read, Apply Best Practices and Pay it forward.

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McDonald’s Corp. just named company veteran Manu Steijaert as its first global chief customer officer, who will lead a new customer experience (CX) team. The team will combine operations in data analytics, digital customer engagement, marketing, restaurant development, and restaurant solutions.

After CVS and Walgreens, here, too, the CMO reports to a chief customer officer, marginalizing their marketing role. Other CMOs are launching CX functions or embedding the CX discipline as part of their marketing organizations.

Over the past few months, my colleagues Joana de Quintanilha, Mike Proulx, and I spoke with over 50 marketing and CX leaders, and many of them referred to a lack of organizational alignment and political tensions over who leads what. Egos and org structures are often one of the key elements blocking marketing and CX collaboration. Others include the fact that CX demands a long-term commitment, that CX is often wrongly seen as a marketing “add-on,” and that marketing and CX methodologies and toolsets lack alignment.

Let’s be real: There’s no silver bullet in terms of an organizational model; even if there was, organizations don’t change overnight. Multiple structural solutions exist, depending on your company’s culture, legacy, and CX maturity. Stop obsessing about who owns CX in your organization and instead use key catalysts like journey centricity, brand values, innovation, and employee experience (EX) to bring marketing and CX operations together. CMOs can accelerate the convergence between marketing and CX by:

  • Recognizing CX’s importance across the customer journey.

     CX isn’t just about client retention: It plays a key role in improving the prospect experience. CX leaders should work closely with their marketing peers to focus on growth opportunities: piloting new offerings, optimizing the prospect journey, and involving teams in design thinking and co-creation.

  • Using journeys to connect product, marketing, and customer service.

     In Forrester’s 2021 Global Marketing Survey, only 24% of global B2C marketers said they organize around the customer. Journey centricity is a core way to align the entire organization to be more customer-obsessed. Journeys are the starting point, the backdrop, and the connective tissue that bring marketing, product, and customer service together.

  • Ensuring a consistent brand experience in all customer experiences. 

    You must define and execute on your brand strategy to narrow the gap between brand, customer, and employee experiences. Brand reveals the essence of the company to all stakeholders, while CX brings the brand to life.

  • Accelerating go-to-market innovation via a new operating model.

     Instead of trying to transform legacy infrastructure and tools in siloed organizations, some companies create new subsidiaries to accelerate innovation, launch new offerings and products, or enter adjacent markets. Innovation is the perfect opportunity to establish from scratch a new collaboration model between marketing and CX teams.

  • Driving cultural transformation through EX. 

    EX exists at the crossroads of HR, IT, and marketing. Many leaders, especially in Europe, are investing more in EX as a competitive advantage. This is yet another opportunity for CMOs and CX leaders to collaborate to help other C-suite leaders develop the culture of the organization in line with its brand promise. CMOs are already playing a stronger role in getting employees to engage with CX by creating new employee journeys.

Customer experience is the top priority for 49% of global B2C marketers; 28% have already merged brand, marketing, and CX into a single team. Too many brands, however, still have marketing and CX silos that prevent them from creating aligned, resonant brand and customer experiences. As a result, they will fail to seize the opportunity to deliver on their brand promise through their customers’ journeys.

The pandemic has accelerated this phenomenon, with higher acquisition costs forcing companies to focus on customer retention. Successful organizations connect marketing and CX throughout the customer lifecycle.

 

What are your views about CXO and CMO roles?

Do both positions exist where you work? Do you think CX is the new marketing? Is Marketing the new Customer Experience? As you form opinions, check out my fun debate with Colin Shaw on his recent podcast.

The Great Debate: Is Customer Experience The New Marketing?

The Great Debate: Is Customer Experience The New Marketing?

by | Aug 1, 2021 | Featured Blog, Marketing & Branding

There is no denying the fact that Customer Experience (CX) is a brand differentiator. Similarly, we know that Marketing has significant importance in companies of all sizes and industries too. What is less clear and the source of great debate: is Customer Experience the new Marketing? Is Marketing the new CX? Are they the same or completely different?

I first asked this question in Clubhouse, a social networking app where people can chat about shared interests. The answers varied as they did on my LinkedIn poll below.

Is Customer Experience the new marketing

My curiosity continues to grow. While I’m not a debater, I accepted the challenge and went head to head with my friend and smart customer experience expert, Colin Shaw. He invited me to be a guest on his popular “the Intuitive Customer” podcast to discuss our different views.

Press play to listen to our debate: Is Customer Experience The New Marketing?

SUMMARY OF DISCUSSIONS:

What’s the Relationship Between Customer Experience & Marketing Team:  

Colin does not think Customer Experience replaces traditional marketing. I believe is it blending in, and over time, may taking over.  Let’s take a closer look at what we mean.

Colin’s Position: We have a lot of evidence showing that if you improve your Customer Experience, you will gain more customers. But does that mean you should take the marketing budget and spend it on improving the Customer Experience? No. While he agrees that improving your Customer Experience is essential to gaining more revenue, there is still value in traditional marketing channels. Customer Experience, therefore, shouldn’t replace traditional marketing but work alongside it.

My Position: I agree that the marketing and Customer Experience champions have to work together. However,  what marketing does sets the stage for what Customer Experience will do. I believe marketing has been about creating a brand with consistency in feelings, colors, the logo, and messaging. Customer Experience takes that brand awareness to another level, beyond awareness as a concept but manifesting that through the actual Customer Journey, from end-to-end. The actions started by marketing are finished by Customer Experience, which is why it is the “new” marketing.

Before we go any further, let’s discuss…

The Definition of Customer Experience & Marketing  

Colin provides a good explanation: “Customer Experience is an entire interaction that a person has with the organization, including the rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological aspects. It could begin with passing a billboard (designed by marketing) or seeing an article about the company (placed by marketing). The point is, it starts long before a customer goes to a store or calls into the call center.”

The American Marketing Association says that “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value to customers, clients, partners, and society at large.“

Colin’s Position: “Marketing delineates the marketplace and, therefore, should work out the features and benefits of the organization’s offer along with the brand promise that shapes the desired experience. If you imagine that you started a company, the initial activities of marketing would provide the framework to determine the experience that the organization gave to the customer.”

My Position: I don’t see marketing breaking silos across the organization or designing that end-to-end experience. The reality is that while marketing is instrumental to the Customer Experience team, it is the Customer Experience team that brings in the other (siloed) departments like marketing, finance, and other operational departments to own the experience. Thus, Customer Experience brings the organization together. I believe that CX is bridging the gap between theory and what is happening in experiences.

Let’s Dive Into Theory

Colin’s Position: Customer Experience is a subdiscipline under marketing. The marketing team sets the theory by defining the target customer, segmenting the market, and positioning the offering. You can’t express the Customer Experience before you set the target customer and the offering in my mind. Therefore, in theory, Customer Experience can’t replace marketing because it’s a subset of it. However, once you get out of theory, it’s Customer Experience that does anything with these definitions. So, in practice, Customer Experience is not a subset of marketing but a separate entity with the same goals and mindset as marketing for customers and the offering. From that perspective, it is as if marketing is the theory and Customer Experience is the practice. In other words, marketing defines what they want for customers at a conceptual level, but Customer Experience teams actually do it.

My Position: I believe there is a difference, and while the two departments blend, Customer Experience takes the feelings marketing seeks to evoke and elevates it to the next level. Customer Experience evokes emotions, measures the feelings, and whether customer expectations are met. It is the continuous measurement and fixing and closing the loop that makes a huge difference. Marketing alone doesn’t do all that.

For example, organizations want to create a positive first impression during customer onboarding. So, while marketing will develop the collateral, the onboarding message and process content develop in partnership with the Customer Experience team. I believe the Customer Experience team is at the forefront of understanding what customers want and what they need to have a great experience and elicit positive feelings. Customer Experience brings that outside view into designing the onboarding experience and then putting it to market and measuring that. The marketing team then creates the messaging to solicit those feelings and enforce that desired brand image. This relationship between the experience and the messaging is why  Customer Experience and marketing teams should blend.

Colin proceeds to say he thinks I might be right…(I’m still smiling).

 

So, What Do We DO with This Information?

There are differences of opinion here, but ultimately, the ideas are not as far apart as we initially thought. The main difference is the idea of what could be and what actually is. So, if we were to say that Customer Experience is the new marketing, here are some practicalities that you can use in your organization,

1. Have both entities represented at your organization.

Some organizations only have a marketing team. Others have both. Both Colin and I would like to see the awareness and understanding that both skill sets drive value for customers and, ultimately, the bottom line. Maybe that’s a person with a diverse skill set, or maybe two teams, but both should be present in a company, and their work can merge. Traditional marketing isn’t enough. There has to be a collaboration between Marketing and Customer Experience to win as a company.

2. Don’t have an either-or mentality. 

Colin and I agree to avoid extremes. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Customer Experience does not need to replace marketing, and not the other way round either. Improving experience helps you gain more, but Customer Experience efforts should be in conjunction WITH the marketing team instead of the marketing team. Think of Customer Experience as Marketing 2.0. Another way to think of it is that marketing can’t be done now without Customer Experience.

3. Have your executive team reflect on the collaboration. 

In addition to blending the activities of the two departments, I strongly encourage organizations to have equal representation for both ideas at the c-suite level. In other words, if you have a CMO, then you need a CXO in the office next door.  

These discussions are fun. And to quote Colin,

None of us is as clever as all of us. Therefore, no one has all the answers. Yet, these discussions are great because they bring up the level of everyone’s game, whether you win the debate or (ahem) lose it.

Colin Shaw

 There you have it. No promotions, no gimmicks, just good information. 

Interested in another debatable topic?

Read “What’s the Fate of a Customer Experience Officer (CXO)?  My response to the Wallstreet journal article presents different views. I’m interested in hearing yours. Let’s keep the CX conversations going.

5 Communication Tips To Improve Customer & Employee Experiences

5 Communication Tips To Improve Customer & Employee Experiences

by | Jul 10, 2021 | Company Culture & Employees

Communication is a significant driver of human connections. HOW messages are delivered is as important as WHAT is shared. Talking in person is ideal. However, sometimes it is not possible given physical location and related factors.

Seth Godin talks about using the appropriate medium. His words and suggestions below resonate a lot because the lack of communication is a significant reason customers and employees are dissatisfied. The good news is that communication is in our control and easy to fix when issues arise.

Continue Reading →

How Trader Joe’s Does Experience Right – An Insider Perspective

How Trader Joe’s Does Experience Right – An Insider Perspective

by | Jun 26, 2021 | Company Culture & Employees

How do you keep employees engaged to deliver great customer experiences (CX)? There are many answers to this question, of which creating a company culture where everyone feels included, valued, and appreciated are significant factors.  You can see what “Doing CX Right” means by visiting Trader Joe’s, known for transforming grocery shopping since 1967.

Employees consistently go out of their way to deliver amazing customer service and experiences for each other. I believe that’s the secret sauce. There’s a clear commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and shoppers can feel it. I encourage you to go to any location and watch people’s interactions, as you will learn so much about humanizing business as a brand differentiator.

Besides observations, I’ve gained insights from talking to Trader Joe’s staff at all levels of the organization, especially in June, known as Pride Month in the United States. (It’s when festivities, parades, and events occur to honor LGBTQ voices and experiences and raise attention to issues community members face.)

My conversations with store staff validate my beliefs about the connection of employee experiences impacting customer satisfaction. They go hand in hand. Employee appreciation isn’t just a nice to do. It’s essential for retention,  brand advocacy, and long-term business growth (see stats and chart below).  

A View From The Inside Of Trader Joe’s

Interview with Heidi Leindecker, Assistant Manager at Trader Joe’s, La Quinta, California

Stacy: What’s the significance of Pride Month? Why shall businesses care?

Heidi: Pride month is about equality and acceptance for the LGBTQ+ community.  It’s a time to reflect on how far we’ve come, dating back from the 1969 Stonewall Riots to where we are today and unequivocally how much more there is to achieve with gay rights.  It’s a time to spread awareness, as well as a time to celebrate the freedom to be ourselves.  It’s about being proud of who you are no matter who you love.

Stacy: Is Trader Joe’s supporting the LGBTQ+ community?

Heidi: Trader Joe’s is a role model for hiring diversity and practicing inclusion. The company cultivates a positive image when it comes to inclusion and its brand amongst employees and consumers.  Trader Joe’s puts the employee first and makes sure that everyone is treated with integrity and respect.  Employees are treated equally in the same manner as customers are treated equally.  As employees are treated well, the feeling naturally overflows to the customers’ positive shopping experience.

Stacy: How has Trader Joe’s supported the LGBTQ+ community?

Heidi: Prior to same-sex marriage, Trader Joe’s supported domestic partnership by giving the employee’s partner equal benefits, including medical, dental, and vision.  They also extended the benefit of 10% off of all store purchases to their partners.  The company continues to recognize the partners of the employees by giving them an open invitation to all company parties and events.  Trader Joe’s has a Zero Tolerance Policy for sexual harassment and their training material is updated annually. For example, recently there was a video training that management and crew members viewed that included the importance of gender pronouns.

Stacy: Is Trader Joe’s doing anything to recognize Pride Month?

Heidi: One of the ways that come to mind how Trader Joe’s recognized Pride Month is that all stores received in June really nice cut and potted rainbow roses. These flowers have been very popular with our customers and were also advertised in Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer.

Stacy: What can other company leaders learn from Trader Joe’s for their own employees?

Heidi: Trader Joe’s invests largely in their diverse employees and creates a happy atmosphere where workers want to help customers with a smile.  Employees are appreciated, valued, and free to be themselves.  They are encouraged to go above and beyond and they have the freedom to find unique ways to help customers.  The friendly vibe of Trader Joe’s comes from the personalities of the individual employees, in addition to the company culture.  Trader Joe’s encourages their employees to have fun at work and trusts them to give customers an experience that they can’t get anywhere else. The company believes in the importance of sending a clear message that they stand for equality and acceptance, not just during Pride month, but every day of the year.

Heidi Leindecker, Assistant Manager at Trader Joe's, Shares Employee Experience Perspective during Pride Month

Thank you Heidi for sharing your social views and business perspective. You are an admirable woman leader and wonderful spouse to my sister❣️

By the way….for data lovers

Global consultancy McKinsey & Co published an extensive report that reveals companies in the top quartile of gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to experience above-average profitability than peer companies in the fourth quartile. That number was up from 21% in 2017 and 15% in 2014. Also interesting, when it comes to staffing, companies that have higher degrees of racially and ethnically diverse employees have a 35% performance advantage over companies relying on a “culture fit” that tends to trend white and monocultural.”

The Value of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Customer Experiences

Learn more about the impacts of employee experiences, and contact me to discuss how to improve your company culture through simple and effective tactics.

How To Secure Customer Experience Investment

How To Secure Customer Experience Investment

by | May 16, 2021 | Metrics & Measurements

Getting Executive buy-in and budget for customer experience programs is not so easy when there are leaders at the top who don’t fully understand the true value of CX. MyCustomer interviewed me and other customer experience professionals to find out what we have learned and recommend to gain resources and investments to support CX goals. I’m sharing a copy of the original article in hopes that more people will learn and apply the key tactics shared.

How To Get Customer Experience Investment

 As we discovered in a previous article, a combination of factors has conspired to make the job of demonstrating the value of CX programs more important than ever for customer experience professionals.

Whether it be the difficult trading conditions creating a squeeze on resources and budgets, or the concept of customer experience management becoming less seductive to the c-suite, or even the CX profession finding itself distracted by the trivial instead of the operational, boardrooms are less willing to support CX programs unless they are convinced by their ROI.

We spoke to a cohort of customer experience professionals to find out what they have learned about demonstrating CX value to company leadership during their careers so that we can glean insights into how to win hearts and minds in the c-suite.

But be warned – some bosses are easier to convince than others. As Stacy Sherman, Director of Customer Experience & Employee Engagement at Schindler Elevator Corporation, notes: “Not all leaders understand the importance of investing in customer experience resources, tools, and platforms. That’s because measuring culture, employee engagement, customer loyalty, and related KPIs are not as easy as counting eCommerce sales or retail transactions!”

For these CX skeptics, it can be necessary to build confidence and trust through an incremental approach. Iain O’Connor, senior manager for customer experience and insight at Aegon UK notes: “It’s important to build trust and belief amongst senior leadership and depending on your starting point that may mean starting small with quick wins to show what can be achieved and the impact CX improvements can have on customers but also on internal engagement and culture.”

Sherman agrees: “I recommend you gain buy-in through pilot programs and show impacts in small ways (quantitatively and qualitatively) to then ultimately grow and scale your customer experience programs.”

The power of storytelling

Nina Jones, head of advisor experience at Fidelity International, is another advocate of using qualitative and quantitative demonstrations to generate confidence in customer experience programs. “From my perspective, it is a combination of both qualitative and quantitative data which a customer experience team needs to have to be successful with senior leaders,” she explains. “It is a pure classic play to convince both the right and left-brain people… there are those senior executives who will gladly come with me on an emotional journey if I tell them a really good story; there are others who are only interested in hearing the whole story if it is based in cold, hard facts!”

Nina continues: “Looking back, most of my career has been in engineering-centric organizations, so this led me to always have my data and metrics available and known, as the culture within engineering organizations is naturally data-centric. Whichever job I am in, I always need to have a data analyst or data insight team close to me, so that I am able to prove or disprove my own theories before I even think about stepping into a board room to present a case.

“However, I have also realized that even the most hardened CEOs also love a good story, as they are, at the end of the day human beings! So, by making sure I have all of the compelling data and metrics, the key is then to play it into a compelling story where a CEO or the c-suite are able to rationally and emotionally engage with the experience that the investment is going to make better.”

Keith Gait, leader at The Customer Experience Foundation, and former customer services director at Stagecoach Bus, believes that storytelling allows customer experience managers to bring data alive and show a journey.

“Bring the issues to life with real life examples of failings within the business that hit hard,” he advises. “In my last organization I showed a 15-year-old boy being verbally abused and then put at risk by an employee to demonstrate the issues with front line culture and management behaviors that had been recorded by a member of the public. These are difficult to argue with. Share verbatims. Then demonstrate the financial impact this has on the business. At one company I worked with, we were able to show that every 1% of churn affected revenue by £10milllion, and that churn was directly caused by CSAT.

“Then show the journey of how you go from the baseline to the improvement outcome, whatever that may be, and the staging posts along the way. The key here is to try and show the metrics that will be tracked. It’s not always easy to show direct financial improvement, but we can show many proxy measures that we know will increase the bottom line.”

Customer feedback

Charlotte Dunsterville, chief consumer officer at Sure, is in regular contact with the c-suite to discuss customer experience opportunities and challenges. And to maintain buy-in and foster enthusiasm in ongoing CX investment, she ensures that leadership is privy to direct customer feedback that is collected.

“We have a comprehensive program of customer insight taking in relational and transactional surveys alongside a really engaged panel of our customers who are keen to give us feedback and get involved in ideas for new product launches, how our customer journeys are working, and input on our customer service,” she explains.

“I regularly present direct customer feedback to the senior team so that senior leaders are aware of the pain points, and we also use an automated platform internally to gather employee feedback and understand what we are getting right and what we could still improve for staff. In fact, we treat the customer and employee feedback very similarly with an ongoing loop of feedback, taking action and checking back in.

The approach I’ve found most useful to justify investment is to make sure that senior leaders are close to the feedback.

“So, in summary, the approach I’ve found most useful to justify investment is to make sure that senior leaders are close to the feedback, understand the pain points, and then it’s actually the c-suite leading the charge to improve the experience rather than it being justified by a specialist team. Win-win!”

Patricia Sanchez Diaz, head of customer experience at Centrica, is another advocate for the combination of data and storytelling as a device to demonstrate value but believes that CX professionals, in general, need to work their data harder through analytics.

“One of the fundamental gaps in CX teams is their ability to link improvements or innovation to business strategic targets and to measure it,” she argues. “CX makes sense if it brings value to the business. Often CX teams go about saying that when you bring value to the customer they return, spend more, and therefore the ROI increases – but that needs to be empirically proven.

“CX teams don’t do analytics in many cases – and that’s a mistake. Storytelling + CX analytics that will be the formula to generate funding.”

Proving ROI in a customer-centric, not company-centric way

In a recent article on MyCustomer, Gartner’s Augie Ray warns that one of the main pitfalls customer experience leaders must avoid when demonstrating CX program ROI, is to focus on monetary returns.

By trying to demonstrate how much money the business is making from CX initiatives, it is adopting a company-centric approach, instead of a customer-centric one, he suggests. CX leaders should be demonstrating what they get by improving customers and their relationship with the brand, rather than probing how much money can be extracted from them or how much costs can be reduced to lift short-term income.

He explains: “CX leaders must answer the ROI question in a way that doesn’t merely turn CX into another strategy for lowering costs or lifting acquisition. Instead, leaders need an approach that demonstrates how the company profits when customer expectations are understood, their needs are met, and their relationships strengthened.”

Ray recommends that the way to keep the focus on the customer while still demonstrating the ROI opportunity to business leaders is to follow three steps:

  • Step one: Start with data on customer perception. The starting point is to make sure you have customer-sourced information about customer perception. This is typically derived through Voice of the Customer (VoC) surveys asking questions about customer satisfaction (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), or net promoter score (NPS).
  • Step two: Combine and analyze your VoC and operational data. The next step in the process is to find and use operational and financial data at the customer level. Most typically, CX leaders will seek to collect and import data on retention, sales growth, number of products acquired, cost to serve, or referral volume. Once you combine the VoC scores provided by customers and the financial or business data of those same customers, you can begin to analyze the differences in business and financial value associated with customers who are satisfied versus dissatisfied.
  • Step three: Get the right data to the right people. Research demonstrates that organizations drive more customer-centric decision-making by showing leaders why being customer-centric is in their own best interest and not merely in the best interests of the entire firm. For example, you might show digital leaders that highly satisfied customers are more likely to trust, adopt and engage with the company’s digital platforms. By analyzing the relationship between customer satisfaction scores and a variety of business metrics, CX leaders can show the ROI of CX in terms of the outcomes for which each leader is responsible.

Ray concludes: “You’ll note that this approach keeps the focus on the customer – their perception and satisfaction with your products and services. We are not merely calculating how much the company can make or save from a given CX effort but instead proving why lifting CSAT, CES, and NPS scores benefit the organization’s growth, margin, and bottom line. By taking this approach, we keep the focus on the customer while demonstrating that customer satisfaction is a business driver worth investment.”

Final advice

But a final word of advice – be prepared for your attempts to demonstrate value go awry. And if your presentation to the board doesn’t go according to plan, don’t give in!

As Nina Jones notes: “Board meetings do not always go as you may have planned even with your most bulletproof business case! However, in my experience ‘no’ doesn’t mean’ no’ most of the time. It usually means, ‘you haven’t convinced me yet’…therefore, from a personal approach perspective, there is a need for customer experience leaders and teams to have bucket loads of tenacity and resilience to be able to dust themselves down, have a good wash up to truly understand what was being said in the room, get back on the horse, regroup and go again!

“Keep the faith that if it is the right thing to do, it may need a couple of goes! I have personally been working on a program for 12 months now with a bulletproof business case and we have still not got everything we need! We will though, I am determined as it is the right thing to do! One thing about a really long protracted decision-making cycle, it provides the opportunity to ensure the business case is, indeed as robust as you think it is!”