Historically, CX was limited to the Chief Marketing Officer’s (CMO) or the Chief Operating Officer’s (COO) purview with different functions in the business operating in siloes focusing on their own priorities.
Let’s take a quick look at how traditional CX thinking has informed how leaders and functions within an organization think about their customer experience strategies:
- CEO: prioritize maximizing profitability
- Marketing and brand: focus on making people want things
- Sales: focus on the product the company wants to sell
- Product development: create products based on market research that are easy to use
- Talent: use traditional metrics based on employee performance within a function (onboarding, annual reviews, etc.)
- Tech and IT: focus on enabling business processes at greater scale
- Operations: focused on providing efficiency for the company that often limits growth
- Supply chain: focus on moving products and goods to consumers
As you can see above, each department and function has its own priorities, targets and metrics. With blinders to the rest of the company, each department is executing a specific customer experience strategy template without seeing the bigger picture. Instead of operating in isolation, companies need to organize all of their internal operations in new ways to evaluate and serve changing consumer needs.
To remain relevant and compete in today’s ever-changing world, customer experience strategies need to be top of mind for every stakeholder in your business. From management to marketing to sales to service, everyone across front- and back-office functions needs to be invested in delivering a life-centric customer experience.
By taking the company’s existing assets (such as talent, data and technology) and rewiring them for more coordinated action, internal operations become simplified in pursuit of a common goal. Internal alignment lets companies pursue an external strategy that maximizes customer experience.
This is a pivotal moment for the C-suite. Leaders who push beyond traditional CX strategies and redefine their organizations, not just by which products or services they sell and offer, but with a life-centric approach to understanding and meeting customer needs, will emerge stronger and ignite growth in their organizations.