Who is responsible for customer experience in your company?

After a recent, very shocking, customer experience with a service provider, I had to ask myself, “who’s responsible for customer experience in this company”

It was a rhetorical question, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to know who are.

After 13 phone calls and four emails, I was no closer to resolving an easy query than before I had started. I wanted to be heard and, more importantly, sort out the actual issue that had me calling in the first place, but I had no idea who to direct my frustrations to. When I asked to be put through to the post call IVR system, it wasn’t working, so I couldn’t even give feedback. I wanted to write an email and get someone to address my issues, but I didn’t even know who to send this to. Which leaves me frustrated, angry and about to tell everyone I know on social media about this encounter.

Are your customers feeling the same way I am? Who should be taking ownership of bad customer experience?

Here’s who should be responsible for customer experience in every company

While you might have said it’s the contact centre’s responsibility for CX, you need to remember that it doesn’t matter if your customer interacts with a customer service representative, technical support or CEO, he will be measuring and judging your company based on his experience. It doesn’t matter who he’s interacting with. (Bearing in mind, I even spoke to a supervisor)

This shows that CX is everyone’s responsibility, not just your contact centre agents. The points below show you how to implement CX responsibilities in different divisions in your company, not just your contact centre.

1) Your execs and C-suite

In successful CX companies, top management pioneers customer experience. The execs and C-Suite drive the value of each customer and the importance of a positive customer experience throughout the company. Executives should set the standard that attitudes are positive in every situation and that employees go above-and-beyond to find solutions on behalf of customers. You should have someone from this team driving cx through your whole company.

2) Marketing team

Social media is now one of the most popular ways for customers to get in touch with companies and have their say, and this is normally when your marketing team gets involved with customers and complaints. This team needs to know how to respond to your customers in the public eye – remember, it isn’t just your customer reading the response.

Your marketing team also sends email campaigns and customers will reply to the specific email with questions, comments or complaints.

It’s in these areas that marketing needs to be responsible to try help the customer instead of just ignoring the complaint or email.

3) Maintenance groups

If your company supplies a service, the team handling maintenance have an impact on CX. For example, if you run a group of hotels and your team doesn’t maintain the buildings properly, guests could think this lack of attention applies to them too.

Make sure the maintenance teams also understand the impact they have on CX.

4) Human resources

 Linking CX to HR might not seem obvious. But remember, they’re responsible for hiring employees that will interact with your customers. These employees then help maintain your company CX strategy.

Similar to the executive team, HR helps set the standard for how employees interact with customers. HR should offer training or guidelines for employees to reference. They also need to maintain consistent customer experience in all departments.

Even if you have a designated team, the responsibility for supporting your clients can’t rest on your contact centre alone. It’s up to every employee to step up, take ownership and support great customer experience.

So, when determining who’s responsible for the customer experience, I say hands down it’s everyone in your company! But since you always need one person to spearhead and take control, someone from your executive team or C-Suite must be responsible to make sure all employees are driving great customer experience.

To think, if one of the 11 people I spoke to had taken ownership and interacted with another division within the company, I would probably still be a customer. Instead I took my business to their competitor, and considering this was a monthly premium payment, they’re now losing out on the lifetime of my contribution.