Advertising Age has a short but interesting article on how CMO’s Pressed to Lead Customer Experience Efforts, But Their Progress is Lacking. Customer Experience has a huge overlap with Digital Transformation. It’s many of the same technologies and change in process but geared towards your most important constituent, the customer. Here’s a few quotes before I add my own commentary.
Note the Top CMO Expectation
So expectations are high regarding who is in charge of creating the customer experience. However, it’s not as easy as it seems:
“It’s a new expectation and it’s a difficult expectation,” said Laura McLellan, VP-marketing strategies at Gartner and author of the report. Ms. McLellan said the opportunity to lead customer-experience efforts is an opportunity for CMOs to gain more influence within their companies, but they risk leaving that influence on the table if they don’t take the reins soon. “Now is the time,” she said.
Even though CEOs were expecting CMOs to master customer experience, only 6% of respondents cited customer experience as their company’s important strategic priority in 2014.
Laura McLellan goes on to say that it’s hard because of the newness of the discipline.
Why It’s Hard
Let’s think of three hard things:
- Taking up a new initiative that’s still being defined
- Breaking down organizational and process silos in your company
- Combining technologies that haven’t interacted much before to create new functionality
Now combine those three things together and you’ve got customer experience. What makes it more difficult is that while it makes sense for a CMO to take the reins on this, it represents a sharp change from previous roles and responsibilities. Technology figure heavily in this and with it comes a need to understand the implications and the dependencies of those technologies.
This is where any smart company will have the CIO working very closely with the CMO to enable this. Both sides need to contribute and to ask for help where necessary.
Let me leave you with on final thought on making this work:
She also stressed how much work it takes to get companies to rethink the way they do business in order to improve their approach to customer experience: “This is a huge change-management process.”
