What’s the single most-effective action you can take to improve the customer experience? Centralize customer experience (CX) responsibility under a single leader or team.
To uncover today’s best customer experience management practices, [24]7.ai partnered with CMSWire for this second annual survey. The CMSWire research team interviewed hundreds of CX leaders, examining how organizations address the customer experience and whether their approaches have changed from a year ago.
Centralized Customer Experience Management is Vital to the Future of CX Leadership
The bottom line is that organizations do better when responsibility rests in the hands of a single person or team. Leaders in a centralized CX team often see that their work significantly impacts business-critical priorities, including customer satisfaction, company growth, and responsibility. Centralizing CX also increases the impact on net promoter scores. Yet only 40% of survey respondents have centralized CX teams within their organizations, slightly down from 43% in 2021.
The Impact of Centralized CX Teams
Centralized CX organizations are more likely to use objective metrics, such as customer lifetime value and acquisition costs. Distributed CX organizations, on the other hand, are more likely to use anecdotal metrics, such as customer satisfaction and customer retention rate. Perhaps what’s most important, centralized CX teams are more likely than their distributed counterparts (85 to 68%) to be fully committed to a customer-first strategy.
Centralized CX organizations are thinking ahead and reacting to the new reality of acquiring and retaining customers over a long time— because retaining customers has become harder than ever. Decentralized organizations are less focused on that. However, focusing on creating exceptional customer experiences will keep customers coming.
Take Your Centralized CX Management to the Next Level
Most organizations have increasingly focused on improving CX—but to be successful, the CX leader of the future must embrace digital transformation, be data-driven, and always put the customer first.
Your organization will significantly improve the customer experience by centralizing its CX operations. Such organizations have these characteristics in common:
- More fully committed to a customer-first approach
- Use more key performance indicators (KPIs) to improve CX
- Better align goals to organizational objectives
- See how their efforts impact CX “a great deal.”
Take the Next Step
As customer loyalties shift and customers become more particular about what brands they align with, delivering exceptional CX is essential for organizations. The pandemic brought about a considerable shift in customer behavior almost overnight. As a result, organizations need to adapt to these new behaviors.
All hope isn’t lost. Drive your customer experience forward by taking a deeper dive into our resources: