Why Customer Experience Needs a Seat at the Executive Table

The results are in, and it’s obvious: customer experience is The. Biggest. Thing. Ever. Today’s retailers are finding that success in the marketplace has less to do with product price and selection and everything to do with customer experience. According to Deloitte, 62 percent of companies now see customer experience as the key competitive differentiator. That said, for some companies, keeping CX front-of-mind can be challenging. “Amid the pressures of finances, logistics, manufacturing, personnel, etc., customer experience can slip off the radar in the upper levels of management,” says Christa Heibel, founder and CEO of CH Consulting Group.

Companies who recognize this breakdown are responding with the addition of chief customer officers (CCO’s) to serve in the C-Suite. According to Heibel, it would behoove more companies to make similar appointments. “Customer experience needs to be a company-wide initiative,” she says. “For that reason, it has to have a seat at the executive table. In fact, it will increasingly be key to marketplace dominance.” The CCO is responsible for conceiving of, coordinating and championing customer experience. In short, he or she is charged with putting the customer first throughout all levels of the organization and ensuring the voice of the customer is not only heard, but understood and acted upon.

“I see the emergence of the CCO as further evidence that the call center is becoming the customer experience center,” says Heibel, who has more than 25 years of experience in the call center industry. As a result, call centers are aligning under the CCO in company org charts. “The call center will finally have a better home than it’s ever had before,” Heibel says of this transition. “It has always been a bit lost, not part of sales, not part of marketing, and never fully appreciated or escalated as it needed to be.” Until now.

According to Gartner, more than 50 percent of companies will put more of their overall investments into customer experience strategies and innovations by 2018. “If you don’t have a CX strategy in place today, you should have one by tomorrow,” Heibel says only half-jokingly. CHCG offers a full suite of customer experience solutions, including outsource management, vendor selection and management, agent training and offline staff development, Omni channel project strategy, project management and more. “For many business leaders, it’s a matter of not knowing what you don’t know. That’s where we can help,” Heibel says.