CEOs: CX/EX are NOT Programs

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For your Customer Experience (CX) programs and Employee Experience (EX) programs, take a page from these playbooks: Data Processing and Personnel Administration programs of the 1960s are IS&T and HR functions today.[1]

• As programs, these areas of your company were siloed, managing something specific on their own.
• As functions, they are indispensable to everyone's operational capabilities.
• As functions, they require every employee to responsibly manage data, devices, people, and interactions.
• As functions, they enable efficiencies, scalability, strategic advantages, and brand differentiation.

Re-position CX and EX programs as CX and EX functions -- no longer siloed -- requiring every employee to responsibly manage their effects on fellow employees, as well as their internal and external customers -- and enabling companywide efficiencies, scalability, strategic advantages, and differentiation.

A program implies a self-contained effort or an effort that may be finished sometime. Neither is true for CX or EX. No matter how big your CS, CX, or EX teams are, you can never guarantee excellence, because frankly, every person in your enterprise (and your suppliers and partners) can make decisions or handoffs that mess up CX or EX. This is why CX and EX are NOT programs. They are functions like Finance, HR, IS&T, Safety, and so on, that require proactive sharing of responsibility among every employee, supplier, and partner companywide.

Shared responsibility across all employees for their respective ripple-effect on customers, both external and internal, expands the value and ROI of CX and EX. There is plenty of precedent for this: as a vital function,

• Finance requires every manager to take a moment to pay attention to budgeting at least quarterly.
• HR requires every supervisor to pay attention to performance reviews and much more.
• Safety requires every employee to pay attention to certain safety needs.
• IS&T requires every employee to pay attention to how they use email and data and devices, and so on.
• CX and EX leaders certainly can and should follow suit!

CX and EX responsibilities of every employee are not an extra burden on their plate. CX insights and EX insights are like regulations or industry standards for what it means to do a good job. "Three-quarters of executives said nobody in the organization is setting the roadmap for how to be an effective employee", reports Tiffani Bova, author of the newly released book, The Experience Mindset.

Indeed, CX and EX insights are even better, because they come from the hand that feeds you! Customers pay for your salary and budget and dividends. Employees make it possible for customers to do so. CX and EX responsibilities of every employee are simply tweaks of how they make decisions, how they communicate internally and externally, and how they make handoffs of their work to whoever uses it.

Let's all STOP using the word program with CX, EX, VoC, journey mapping, etc. Instead, let's START using the words function, initiative, effort, and way of life. CX and EX insights are your C-Suite's North Star to guide every strategy!

Pivot from Programs to Functions

See how to elevate your 2024 CX/EX accordingly in this article published today:

How to Thrill Investors with Your Chief Customer Officer Leadership Playbook

Here's a peek at this article's opening: "Everyone believes employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) are symbiotic: one affects the other continually. Hmmm . . . Is this how your CEO has set up the senior leadership team? "

"Does the Chief Customer Officer coordinate employee experience with customer experience? Does your Chief Human Resources Officer coordinate customer experience with employee experience? If not, why not? What does it mean for your Chief Customer Officer leadership playbook? And to investors?"

This re-thinking is vital to your corporate growth rate. Vast opportunities are flying out the window due to quiet quitting. Inefficiencies are crippling the potency of your Marketing and Sales budgets. Every gap in EX and CX is squandering your precious revenue and profit. Most importantly, EX gaps and CX gaps sideswipe your value to investors, employees, partners, customers, and communities.

Avoid Function Caveats

In a 2022 McKinsey article, Redefining Corporate Functions to Better Support Strategy & Growth, we're reminded that "organizational redesigns are often prompted more by who is designing them than by objective, fact-based decisions about what maximizes value".[2]

In HBR's article, The One Thing You Need to Know About Managing Functions, we're reminded that "functions can become vital engines of the business. . . . Functions should compare themselves with functions in other companies only if the companies’ strategies are similar. . . . Functions do not have to be servants to corporate overlords, nor should they be petty tyrants building their own empires".[3] These are caveats to avoid:

• "Servile strategy: do everything the business units want." [3]
• "Imperial strategy: put the function first." [3]
• Be-all strategy: rely on tech providers for your entire CX/EX playbooks.
• Cherry-picking strategy: drive quick wins wherever resistance is lowest.
• Spaghetti strategy: expect CX/EX proclamations and programs to stick (to become the walk of your talk).
• Satellite strategy: throw shortcuts over the wall to Customer Success, Service, and Loyalty programs to rescue value.
• Segregation strategy: focus your Head of CX on customer touchpoint revenue and focus your Head of EX on employee touchpoints.
• Full-plate strategy: due to resource constraints, overwhelm, pet projects, or myopia, limit CX/EX strategy to a portion of what CX and EX really are. Would this ever be acceptable in Manufacturing, Engineering, Finance, IS&T, HR, and so on? Heavens, no! This is the full spectrum of CXM and EXM:

A pivot is long overdue from programs mentality. Every strategy listed above is strangling value.

What's Needed Now

In my new article, How to Thrill Investors with Your Chief Customer Officer Leadership Playbook, you'll see these subtopics:

A) Take a Page from Sports Playbooks

B) CX Trends Reflect EX Trends, or Vice Versa

C) Excessive Costs to Investors, Customers & Employees

D) Who’s Driving Employee-Centricity & Customer-Centricity?

E) Your CCO Leadership Playbook

For what’s needed urgently in 2023-2024, you’ll see that your HR Chief is a vital partner, but your Chief Customer Officer is better suited:

1. Business context for every employee’s purpose, i.e. their effect on gaps in what’s received versus promised to customers who make their salaries and budgets possible.
2. Lifetime value mindset regarding employees, internal customers, and external customers.
3. Expertise in listening posts and analytics.
4. Urgency in acting on insights.
5. Accountability in closure of action plans.
6. Continual progress in closing gaps between the value proposition and what’s received by both external customers and internal customers.

Strategic Re-Centering

In social media and in-person conversations among CX managers, there is tremendous enthusiasm for the EX = CX concept. Yet, in CX job descriptions at any level, it is extremely rare to see stewardship of CX and EX jointly. It's even rare to see cross-pollination of CX and EX lessons learned. Why? Programs mentality undermines the holistic approach needed to connect CX and EX.

Likewise, there is overwhelming agreement that the top purpose of CX is customer-centric management of your enterprise. Yet, in CX job descriptions, books, etc., CX roles seem to be limited to Customer Success, Service, Digitalization, Design, CRM, Personalization, Loyalty, and Journey Mapping.

Why? Massive turnover during and since the pandemic has placed a lot of new people in CX roles. It also crystalized focus of CX staff on tactics (programs) rather than holistic strategy. The obvious revenue impact of Customer Success (programs) has taken over true CX management. CS/CX/EX professionals are in love with what they do, and nobody wants to rock the boat.

This is why I've dedicated this LinkedIn article series to CEOs. Take a look at the perpetually circular CX/EX trends which are both going downward presently, and the huge costs caused by these CX/EX trends: How to Thrill Investors with Your Chief Customer Officer Leadership Playbook.

By adopting this playbook, you’ll influence far more profitability and revenue growth than a Customer Success, Customer Service, or Chief Revenue Officer can do on their own. It will absolutely boost Gross and Net Retention Rates, First Time to Value, Product Usage and Adoption, Unit Cost of Delivery, Net Recurring Revenue, Net Promoter Scores, Customer Effort Scores, Customer Health Scores, Market Share, Return on Assets, and Earnings Per Share.

This CCO Leadership Playbook is your key to stopping the insanity of reciprocal negative trends in employee motivation and customer experience performance relative to rising customer expectations.Our global society and economy urgently need CEOs to step-up the CX/EX opportunity for far greater growth.

I welcome your questions and comments about these recommendations.

Author?Lynn Hunsaker?coined the phrase "Experience Leadership" to represent what's needed in the 2020s to pivot to far greater trust, respect, values, and value. To fast-track your pivot,?Experience Leadership Mastery?guides you within 2 to 10 hours across every managerial level in customer, partner, and employee experience combined.

You're Invited!

As ClearAction's CX Day gift to you, our complimentary webinar will help you make 2024 your most efficient, customer-centric, and growth-generating year ever. See more at Growth via Massive Customer Experience Savings. This is a 30-minute encore presentation from Lynn Hunsaker's 90-minute session at CXPA's 2023 CX Leaders Advance conference. Choose September 28 or October 12 or October 19.

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References

[1] https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/spring-2023/pages/the-75-year-history-of-shrm.aspx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_processing

[2] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/redefining-corporate-functions-to-better-support-strategy-and-growth

[3] https://hbr.org/2019/07/the-one-thing-you-need-to-know-about-managing-functions