You Hired a Chief Experience Officer. NOW, WHAT? (Part 1)

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31 Oct You Hired a Chief Experience Officer. NOW, WHAT? (Part 1)

Posted at 06:30h in Insights by

Many companies contact us for help in setting up customer experience teams.  The circumstances in most cases are eerily similar: senior leaders recognize the importance of experiences for attracting and retaining customers, BUT they haven’t given much thought to the role that the CX leader and her team will play in the organization.  

Here are 3 tips we recommend in our customer experience consulting practice: 

  1. Identify the kind of experience you want to deliver. 

    The ROI of investing in specific customer experiences depends on your industry, your brand, and your value proposition.  Do your homework before you hire the CXO–you will be doing everyone a huge favor. Also, customer experience means different things to different companies and people. We emphasize the following elements of CX to our clients:

  • The experience with your product/service is holistic and covers a sum of all interactions and covers the entire lifecycle.
  • Customer experience is about emotion.  It is about how the experience makes users feel.  Different products and services should make people feel different. Think about the emotions that matter most to your particular company.
  • Customer service is part of the customer experience, but it isn’t the same thing.

    2. Hire the right people.

    You will benefit from a diverse team in terms of skills, education, temperament, and communication style. Encourage employees to stretch and develop new skills, make sure it contains at least several seasoned professionals who can establish the vision and guide less experienced team members. 

    3. Don’t forget a team charter. 

    What will the new team do?  Where does it sit in the operating model? How will it engage other parts of the organization? Without a game plan for how and new leader and her team will influence business, as usual, their odds of success are extremely low. 

The purpose of the charter is to position the customer experience teams for success in its interactions with other parts of the organization. 

The charter will include the following: 

  • Roles and responsibilities 
  • Clarity about we do (and don’t do)
  • Success criteria
  • How do we measure success
  • Ideal skillsets (background, experience, and training) 
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