Why CEOs need to be Customer Experience Officers

Traditionally, organisations have rewarded vertical leaders. This has created silos that are now impediments to getting a unified view of the customer’s interactions with the organisation. It also results in a fractured and at times, frustrating experience for the customer. Only the CEO can solve this problem. And if they do, it will lead to industry leading performance.

The customer has always been King

The idea of customer-centricity has been around since the start of the 20th century. It is reported that as early as 1909, Harry Gordon Selfridge, pioneer of retail, coined the term, “The customer is always right”. However, then the customer walked into a store, dealt with a salesman, bought, and paid there and walked out. If something would go wrong with the purchase, the customer came back to the store and got it sorted.

The King went omni-channel

Today, during the buying process the customer interacts with some or all of these: your website - perhaps fills a form or chats with a bot on the site, a call centre employee, a product review site, influencer posts on social media, friends or strangers on social media who have bought similar products, ratings on an e-commerce website where your products are also sold. After the purchase, the customer may leave a review on your website or on social media. If unhappy, may rant about the product on their favourite social spaces. They may call your service help line, send you a mail on that email address that’s printed on the product packaging.

The information is gold

The interactions that your customer or prospect is having with you – happy ones or not – are full of priceless insights. If you could collect these crumbs that are being left behind everyday about your business, you could benefit tremendously – insights into improving your products and services, ideas for new products, opportunities for cross and up selling, signals to anticipate and reduce churn, even totally new business ideas.

The silos get in the way

It is highly likely that most of you know what comes in way of stitching it all together. It is not surprising that organisations have grown into vertical kingdoms. For a larger part of the industrial revolution, growth came from quality products produced in mass, delivered to the customer via an efficient distribution system. This required thinking and doing at scale and led to specialisation – in production, in procurement, in supply chains, in sales, in service and later in marketing.

The King wants instant and quality gratification

Today, the customer demands the same level of response they are now used to from native internet-based and other forward thinking organisations. They don’t care if they are chatting with a bot, a telephone operator, or sending a mail. They expect instant answers and resolutions. Those companies who are providing this are becoming leaders.

Only the CEO can bring it all together

To provide a seamless window to the customer and to take full advantage of the valuable information being generated at every interaction, systems need to speak across traditional lines. Everyone needs to have easy access to how the customer is interacting across the organisation and should be able to react to problems and take advantage of opportunities instantly.

Who has the end-to-end view of the organisation? Who has the authority to start this cross-organisational process?

It’s you, the CEO.