What To Do: Customer Experience Is Doomed To Fail Without CEO Support

Many companies across many industries have caught the customer experience fever ever since its conception in the mid 2000’s.  A few have made amazing progress.  Some have started but progress is stagnant and worse yet, many have tried and failed.  What is the difference?  The CEO!

Without a CEO’s full support, a customer experience strategy and its execution are doomed to fail. During my last decade in advancing customer experience disciplines, I had the fortunate experience where I had full CEO support.   However, I also had the misfortune of being in positions where customer experience was not on the CEO’s list of priorities. 

Here are my top customer experience lessons learned from CEO’s who fully support what I did:

1.       The CEO Must Also Be the “Chief Experience Officer”

A customer experience strategy will drive cultural transformation but it must begin from the top down with the CEO.  Without this vital corporate lifeline, your customer experience efforts will fizzle and die.  The oxygen for customer experience comes from the corner office.  Why?

Like so many others, I started my customer experience career as a department of one.  At this critical phase, you do not want to waste your valuable time by consistently having to convince the CEO that customer experience is the right thing to do for your organization.   You want to focus your energy on driving change in your organization and not on trying to change the CEO’s mind.

2.       Monkey See, Monkey Do

The CEO must consistently communicate the importance of customer experience within and outside the company echoing the same message from the Customer Experience Leader.    Whether it is the investor’s call or the employee forum, the Customer Experience Leader must partner with the CEO to raise the awareness of your customer experience driven strategy.

The CEO must also help set the stage for company wide customer experience goals.   Customer experience will only infiltrate the organization when the CEO help to drive customer experience goals down and across the organization.  Anything that affects compensation such as companywide customer Net Promoter Scores on everyone’s annual goals can only happen if the CEO help champion the cause.   

3.       All Senior Leadership Must Also Engage

The CEO will have a high degree of influence on his direct reports, the leadership team.  You want the highest-ranking employees within all the key functional areas who report into the CEO to also fully support your customer experience efforts.  You will need their complete buy-in when you come knocking on their doors looking for resources to use in your cross functional customer experience team.   They will also help to champion the customer experience cause within their perspective functions.

The world is never perfect especially the business world.  Sometimes we are all put into challenging professional situations through no fault of our own.   What do you do when you are asked to start a customer experience discipline but there is no CEO support? 

Here are the valuable lessons that I’ve learned from working for CEO’s who were either negative or at best, neutral towards launching a customer experience discipline:

1.       Do The Math

Everyone intuitively agrees that customer experience is the right thing to do.   Having come from a marketing background with full P&L responsibilities, I also sympathize with functional areas where generating sales is king.   Customer experience will be tossed aside whenever the sales crunch is on.

When I started in customer experience, I challenged myself to answer the question, “what tangible benefits am I delivering to the organization”.    If you are in customer experience and you can’t answer that question, you will meet all kinds of resistance along the way.   Sooner or later, someone like the CEO will ask that very important question.

Generally speaking, happy customers have larger shopping baskets (buy more in a single purchase).  They will have more frequent repeat purchases (buy more often).  They will recommend your products and services which turn into new sales (recommend more).   Finally, happy customers are more loyal than unhappy customers (stay longer) and will not jump to your competitors.

When I ran the math in one of my customer experience roles, I discovered that happy customers had shopping baskets that were 15% larger.    Happy customers also generated new sales through word of mouth that were 3X more than unhappy customers.   Armed with these tangible benefits helped me to gain support throughout the organization for our customer experience efforts.

2.       Be A Trail blazer - Start With A Small Fire

Customer experience involves getting company buy-in through cultural transformation, listening to customers and acting on their feedback,  working with cross functional team members to fix customer issues, partnering with R&D to develop customer experience products and engaging in  key areas. 

Most customer experience practitioners are lost in terms of where to start.  My advice?  Pick an area where you do not have to start from scratch.  One of the first tasks of someone starting out in customer experience is to do an internal audit of what kind of customer experience activities are occurring in the organization.   It is never zero.   There are usually pockets of customer experience like activities within of the organization even though they may not be officially labelled as customer experience.   Pick one and partner with the individuals involved.  Start small and build scale.

When I began my customer experience role, there were eight years of net promoter score surveys with a million plus of customer feedback.  It was managed by the market research group from which quarterly reports were sent out to the organization.  The recipients would look at the number and then delete the email.   No major action plans were ever created from these valuable customer comments.  I saw this as a gold mine and it became the cornerstone of my customer experience practice.   My motto was action, action and more action.

3.       Influence Influencers In Your Organization

If the CEO is either neutral or negative towards you building a customer experience practice, you will need to find other influential leaders to work with.  These are usually members of sitting on the executive leadership team.  Find the one that you know is most receptive to customer experience.  Don’t pick someone who you have to waste energy and convince them that customer experience is a good thing.   If you have no idea where to start, leaders in customer service, customer support or customer success tend to be most receptive to customer experience.   Leaders distant from customer facing roles such as IT tend to be the least receptive.   This is a rule of thumb.  So your organization may or may not be the case.

My final parting advice?  If at all possible, don’t sign up for a customer experience role where the CEO is negative or neutral about customer experience.  Avoid the growing pains if you can help it.  But if you are already in this predicament, then do your math, become a trail blazer and influence the influencers will increase your odds of success. 
For more lessons learned about customer experience, please see my website:  advancingcx.com

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash