Customer experience touches all parts of the organisation, but who in the business should take ownership of the strategy? This chapter considers who should own CX, as well as the importance of horizontal collaboration.

Who owns CX?

There is no one approach to allocating ownership for CX within the organisation. The trend towards more organisations appointing chief customer officers was noted in previous editions of Econsultancy’s Organisational Structures and Resourcing Best Practice Guide, which cite a 2014 study by the Chief Customer Officer Council. It found that, at that point, 22% of Fortune 100 companies had adopted CCO roles.

At the time, Econsultancy Founder Ashley Friedlein speculated about what a company structure might look like if one were to start from a blank sheet of paper and an intention to be customer centric and  have digital fully integrated.^[1] This design brought together key areas of CX under one ‘customer director’.

The CCO is often a board-level role designed to bring together all customer-focused initiatives and areas of the business under one person so that customer strategy and activities may be unified. Although a number of businesses (notably in service-based industries including finance and utilities) have adopted this approach, the CCO role is far from universal and it is clear from the research that organisations can take different approaches to owning CX, ranging from bringing it together under a CMO role to having different customer-facing functions reporting in to different areas (marketing, operations and so on).

The advantages of having a CCO role is the ability to represent the voice of the customer at the most senior levels within the organisation, and to bring together all elements of CX under one reporting line which can support better integration and coordination. The potential disadvantages may come from the broad scope that a CCO remit will cover, and risk of undervaluing the important operational and functional specialisms that can come from more individually focused reporting lines.

Speaking at the Festival of Marketing, Roy Capon, CEO at Zone (who also contributed to this research), noted how great CX brings together a blend of experience, data, technology and creativity and so requires great leadership, but that it also needs good coordination across multiple areas. Based on findings from the Zone CX50 report produced in association with Marketing Week,^[2] Capon notes how organisations that have responded well to the challenges brought by the pandemic have driven efficiencies and productivity by giving their employees improved access to the tools and technologies that they need in order to do their jobs well from home.

According to the report, CX leading organisations “recognise the need for collaboration across all parts of the business – from technology to data to marketing to HR and everything in between – to get a better view of the customer and enable an even better customer experience”.^[3]

Capon emphasised the importance of technology in enabling great CX as well being focused on simplicity and horizontal collaboration across functions in order to bring it to life.

Many contributors to this research emphasised the importance of having a customer-obsessed mindset. In this sense, ownership sits not only with leaders but also with practitioners throughout the business and particularly with customer-facing teams like marketing and customer service. As Max McShane, Head of Digital at Octopus Energy, noted, everyone in the company has a role to play in supporting exceptional CX.

The need for horizontal collaboration, autonomy and empowerment

Contributors to this research also emphasised the requirement for organisations to work cross-functionally in order to create great CX. There will likely be multiple functions within a business that may touch the customer in some way, from product and marketing teams, to customer service and success teams. Creating forums and processes to bring these different functions together around customer-focused goals is essential to creating that joined-up CX. One way of achieving this would be to bring together all customer facing teams when doing customer journey mapping as a way to ensure that all parts of the journey are represented and that a connected and aligned approach to optimisation can be taken.

It was noted that when touchpoints or customer data is dealt with across different areas of a business, it can be difficult to join up customer journeys in seamless ways. One example of this in practice is when customer service representatives need to pass customers on to other departments to deal with their enquiry, in cases where the responsibility is held in a different part of the business.

In her article on the future of CX, Emma Robertson notes how reliant this future is on what is done operationally within the organisation, rather than just what the customer sees on the outside.^[4] All the experiences that companies deliver, Robertson says, must be aligned and centred around the customer, and while every formula for doing this is different, there are some common themes for success:

• Uniqueness – amplifying what makes you different, not imitating competitors
• Being balanced – keeping ratios in check and avoiding one element sucking up resource to the detriment of the whole
• Being connected – being considered, planned and managed as an ecosystem.

In order to generate improved experiences, teams need to be empowered through process and technology. At Octopus Energy, Max McShane says, everyone in the business takes ownership for customer service and queries. This is enabled through its technology platform (discussed in Data and Customer Experience Strategy), which brings all customer data into one place and which everyone has access to. This empowerment of employees enables all members of staff to potentially solve customer problems and answer key questions, rather than requiring customers to be passed around between multiple departments.

McShane also noted the importance of purpose and learning in supporting greater team empowerment. The company has a strong, clear purpose: “We’re doing energy better – for you and for the environment.”^[5] The simplicity of this purpose provides staff a good direction, helping them understand the values that matter in decision making. Employees are then entrusted with greater autonomy, for example, by not giving them a script when dealing with customer service enquiries.

As an example, when one member of the team wanted to send flowers to a customer after hearing that a close relative was in the hospital. This kind gesture led to the establishment of a simple but structured way that enables every team to do something similar, meaning that flowers are now sent out to customers on a weekly basis.

Trust, notes McShane, starts with diversity and recruitment: “Diversity is like a dry-stone wall – you need to find the right place to position your stone in the wall rather than chiselling away at it to try and make it fit.”

Learning is also prioritised at Octopus Energy. In the early days of the business, every employee was allocated a £1,500 budget they were allowed to use to learn something new that would benefit the business. Now there is no cap; employees are granted budget for learning and can choose relevant skills to improve without trying to keep costs below £1,500. This has opened up more opportunities for employees, says McShane.

A number of other contributors to this research emphasised the need for teams to continually learn from customer feedback and then to make that learning actionable. These inputs can come from data, analytics, research and feedback, as well as from colleagues across other disciplines that may be handling other touchpoints and seeing similar or different patterns.