One drumbeat during Forrester’s 2010 Customer Experience Forum was the rise of the Chief Experience Officer (CxO). My inner geek needed to know who was the first CxO. My quest went unanswered. If you know drop me a note.
My quest did turn up a few insights. One role description was coined in 2001 by Challis Hodge, a user experience thought leader. The role – as he viewed it – was:
The CXO should ensure that an organization delivers the appropriate experience at every point of contact it makes with the public. This CXO must understand the processes, methods, and tools necessary to understand people, and should be able to translate that understanding into successful points of contact with users, customers, shareholders, employees, partners, and visitors. … In both corporate and professional services positions, the CXO should be responsible for keeping the entire organization focused on the user and the points of contact with the user.
The one upgrade I would make – for our social media networked universe – is that the CxO must ensure closed loop customer and employee feedback is in place and virtual experience refresh is happening.
Two industries – health care and interactive software – both had an initial wave of these roles in the mid 90′s. Not surprisingly, there were some very thoughtful articles on the topic which you should read if you are considering a CxO position or are new in the role.
The Chief Experience Officer by Gary and Leigh Adamson was a more artful view of the CxO in engaging the hearts and mind of patients (customers) and employees and breaking through to make health care personal again (the same could be said of the big bank experience today). Gary and Leigh offered a six “I” framework to describe the role:
- Intentional - design the ideal desired patient (customer) and employee experience and work back to re-engineer the business model.
- Individual - get personal by enabling the organization to remember the personal preferences and aspirations of each customer and employee and then create “just for me today” experiences.
- Interactive - extend the field of vision beyond the transactional moment into a 24 x 7 technologically-enabled relationship to more than transfer information but create relationship sustainability. The extend experiences beyond the time and space of the transactional encounter.
- Interpreted – After getting the first 3 “I”s the CxO then becomes the playwright and director. The art is in creating the stage and performance along with the script, roles, and actors. In functional language it’s the “architecture of the facility” and the recruitment, training, and ongoing development of people.
- Inspirational – Don’t underestimate the transformational leadership required. A CxO must set the aspirational vision and then communicate and coach to it. They champion the notion that experience is the brand and use the artful metric of enthusiasm.
- Instituted - CxOs are accountable to ensure the right “sustain the gain” mechanics and cultural totems are in place and that “the way” is spread throughout the organization.
To learn more about the 6 Is visit the folks at Starizon Design.
As one might suspect the The 6 “I”s approach can be contrasted with the 5 “A”s approach emerging from the Tech Industry at about the same time:
- Assessment – Diagnose the system for pain points where interfaces fail to meet customers’ needs, choke points where customers are prevented from buying or achieving what they desire, or drop-off points where they defect from the buying process entirely.
- Aspiration - Envision the ideal interface system by reverse engineering the desired customer experience of interactions and relationships with the company. Start by defining your brand proposition from the customer’s point of view, and then integrating that with core capabilities.
- Alignment – Construct a plan to optimize, integrate, and align interfaces. This must include the changes required in front- and back-office activities and capabilities—both human and machine. A complete front-office reengineering effort requires analysis of opportunities at each potential service interface
- Articulation - The CXO should focus on three phases in articulating the new interface system: separate, relate, and integrate. In the separate phase, the focus is on optimizing individual interfaces to improve performance in mediating customer interactions while lowering operational cost. In the relate phase, the CXO must drive the company to confirm hypotheses regarding pathways used to pursue the buying process. In the integrate phase, the CXO optimizes interfaces and linkages within the interface system.
- Activation – Upon activation of the new interface system, the CXO must develop metrics that reflect the company’s goals for desired customer interactions, relationships, and resultant customer experiences, and then improve the interface systems based on customer and employee attitudes and behaviors, competitor performance and actions, and technology trends.
My hunch is that after doing a critical thinking 6 “I” (more artistic top-down) and 5 “A” (more quantified bottom up) assessment you’ll be ready to answer the question. Consider these two additional questions:
1. How committed are you in your strategy and business model to customer engagement transformation?
2. How complex is the culture and transformation change?
Well did you decide? To CxO or not to CxO?
Cheers!
