More and more “C” suites are realizing the impact of driving their customer experience and the impact on their company if they don’t continue to evolve. There is so much buzz in the marketplace around Artificial Intelligence, BOT’s, Digital Transformation so executives have begun to create a new role in the organization. The CXO or SVP of Customer Experience role can be a true differentiator for a company, but the role needs to evolve.

Having talked to many new folks in the role in the past year across some of the greatest brands, there is a growing level of disappointment and, in some cases, frustration.   With a very few exceptions, these new executive leadership roles have been turned into customer evangelists for the company.  Organizations have taken one of their top resources and placed in this new role, but they are missing a critical success factor.

Most CXO’s or SVP’s of Customer Experience today have a very small team with no budget or direct operational control to drive change within an organization.   There are too many walls that need to be brought down, but with an executive with no direct decision making they can get caught up into the big company challenges to drive change.

If companies truly want to invest in their customer experience, the CXO role needs to evolve to one that has direct ability to manage and operate at the same time be fully accountable for meeting a well-defined set of KPI’s that may or may not exist in the organization.  

Just getting back from the Forrester CXO event in NYC, it was a reality check how many individuals in their newly appointed CX role were looking to their peers to see what their companies were doing. A level of disappointment came when they all found the similar challenges to be able to make a material impact on their organization.

It is critical for the executive team to start making real commitments to customer experience as the industry leaders are getting the importance of driving change to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.   In most industries unlike in the past it isn’t that difficult to move your business from one brand to another.  Companies are investing so much to attain a new customer and need to look at the lifetime customer value against the upcoming investments and commitment to resources to stay on top of their game.

Similar Blogs