FAQs – Organization Structure

In a perfect world, where every department is customer-centric and functional silos are non-existent, a special customer experience department is not needed. However, that is hardly the case for most companies. Hence there is a need for a customer experience council to drive a customer-centric culture within the organization by:

• Upholding the customer at the centre of all decisions being made.
• Driving cross-functional exchange of information across business units to ensure uniformity of the customer experience delivered.

According to the service profit chain theory, employees are the cornerstone of delivering great customer experience. All CX initiatives must start with engaging employees and empowering them with tools and processes to deliver great CX. You can drive a customer-centric culture in the following ways:

• Define a clear vision for the ideal customer experience and communicate the vision through program branding.
• Train employees with a focus on soft skills and your customer experience objectives. Bring in customer empathy through role-playing customer interactions.
• Empower employees to resolve frontline issues, and reward and recognize exceptional efforts.
• Make customer feedback an integral part of the employee lifecycle through KPI/KRA linkages.

Incentivizing frontline and leadership should only be done when:

• A substantial number of responses are received at each individual touchpoint.
• Each employee is empowered to deliver a great customer experience. This means all support mechanisms are in place to handle incoming detractors.

Hence, we recommend incorporating incentives only much later in the CX program, when the NPS measurement and action loops are in place.

Ideally, there should be two components to the issue resolution mechanism:

• A business unit-wise team responsible for issues for the corresponding touchpoints, ensuring all customer issues are resolved.
• A central team (CX council) responsible for facilitating collaboration between these teams and distill key actionable from the systemic issues faced at the operational levels.

Responsibility for leading CX vertical varies, but the most common choice is the CMO. Customer experience is increasingly the primary way in which a brand is made real and as an architect of the brand strategy, the CMO is often seen as the obvious choice to take charge of its deployment across the entire customer journey. But leading CX is not a siloed responsibility and the right person to take on that responsibility depends on the industry, the current organization, and even individuals.