Greg Verdino turned me on to a fantastic article about the rise of the Customer Experience Officer. The article rightly discusses the real trend of branding today — the comprehensive user experience.
By focusing on the comprehensive user experience, research shows brands strengthen return on investment (ROI).
The below chart shows the ROI impact for companies that focus on their total customer experience. Another recent study from RightNow shows that 86% of consumers would pay more for a better customer experience, and 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience (hat tip: Social Enterprise Today).
Source: Watermark Consulting
This data offers some justification to rethink corporate approaches toward customer interaction. Corporations and larger nonprofits need to consider the comprehensive experience, from start to finish.
I’m not a big advocate of yet another Chief title in the enterprise. Having a quality control method to view the entire experience does make sense to me. Companies should have experience cops who look for weaknesses in the modern brand experience so brands can better meet customers’ multichannel brand experience.
The Modern Brand Experience
Ducati maintains one of today’s best comprehensive brand experiences (Image by Factor-Art)
In today’s networked economy, brands build themselves through more than logos and value propositions.
While visuals and words matter, in reality, customer experiences range through a complex series of touches. It begins with an initial marketing touch or word of mouth referral. Then it extends to product packaging and the customer’s immediate purchase and after purchase experience. Finally, a complete experience concludes with post purchase customer service and follow up communications from a brand.
Some of these touches are brand created, some customer initiated, and others are generated by third-parties.
To be fair, many traditional different roles in the marketing department touch this user experience:
- The product marketer engineers the customer experience from design to packaging to front-line marketing initiatives.
- The classic PR professional serves as an ombudsman between brand and customers.
- Customer service has an obvious and critical role after the sale.
- And today’s community manager uses social technologies to directly interface with customers.
In most companies, these various customer touch points remain siloed.
In fact, silos exist within silos. This “meta siloization” prompted Gini Dietrich and me to write Marketing in the Round in hopes of fostering better functional integration across the marketing department.
The customer experience touches many parts of the enterprise. It defies siloization and even conventional approaches to breaking down silos. This presents challenges for executives who want to assign a task to a department.
Who Owns the Experience Cop?
The customer experience cop likely belongs within the CMO’s day-to-day management, but it’s not that easy. It’s something the lead executive needs to consider, too.
Steve Jobs has become a mercurial icon after death, criticized for his lack of heart and character.
Regardless of the person, Jobs was a fantastic CEO and part of his ability to succeed included delivering an outstanding, comprehensive user experience for Apple customers.
Apple delivers. From word of mouth rumor and product announcement to packaging and initial product use to post customer service and follow-up communications. Though some people love the Genius Bar, the post experience may be the one weak area depending on who you talk to and customer service ratings.
It’s no coincidence that Jobs spent time taking customer service calls, listening to complaints and issues. I’m sure these calls gave him direct insight into how customers experienced the Apple brand after the sale.
Really the entire company needs to be concerned with the customer experience. Without sales, repeat customers, the company does not exist.
Every person could and may touch customers in their daily lives.
Wherever the customer experience cop lives within the organization they are a trusted servant informing the entire company about how to improve and better itself.
To me, every executive in the company needs to support this person and whoever they report to. Silos, cultural focus and processes need to be examined deeply to ensure this experience cop gets the right attention.
Today’s companies can learn from Jobs and focus on what matters most: The customer experience and its cascading effect on financial performance and brand reputation.
How much focus do you think executives should place on the total customer experience?