Blogs

Governance doesn’t get much airtime in customer experience management conversations and writings. It's not as exciting and it's harder to wrap your mind around than customer engagement and VoC and CX technologies. Just what is it, anyway?

The Business Dictionary clarifies governance as "establishment of policies, and continuous monitoring of their proper implementation, by the members of the governing body of an organization. It includes the mechanisms required to balance the powers of the members (with the associated accountability), and their primary duty of enhancing the prosperity and validity of the organization." To summarize as it applies to CX management:

1. The company leaders establish and monitor CX policies.
2. People are empowered and accountable to drive CX success.
3. Mechanisms are put in place to drive CX contribution to the company’s validity and prosperity.

Customer experience governance is essential to ongoing success, especially in terms of enduring CX ROI (return on investment). It's the "glue" that holds all the pieces together, the standards, and most importantly, the mojo of CX progress.

This post is the first in a series of 3 articles to cover 3 keys to getting it right: (1) CXM infrastructure, (2) CX champions, and (3) CX momentum.

1. CXM Infrastructure: An organization accomplishes precisely what it is designed to do. Organizational design must support — not stand in the way of — CX excellence goals.

DO THIS: Define the structure, roles, and processes for CX facilitation at the beginning of your whole effort, and before deploying any tool, technology, or process.

• Create processes for CX excellence facilitation and set expectations across the organization for involvement and follow-through.
• Set up processes to coordinate the managers of the various CX management endeavors across the company: VoC, customer references, retention, escalation, business intelligence, front-line management, UX (user experience), and so on.
• Work through existing structure, roles and processes as much as possible, weaving CX facilitation into your organization’s fabric.
• Set standards of performance and determine how you will balance strategic and tactical needs of CX management oversight.

NOT THAT: Do not wait until something gets rolling for a while to start thinking about governance of it.

• Upfront planning will pay exponentially in comparison to shoring up support and sorting out processes retroactively.
• Even a pilot (test case) should incorporate planning for follow-through. Don't silo-ize CX management, especially not at the start!
• Broad-brush consistency organizationally and with processes and analyses will help you see the opportunities for synergy and meeting bigger opportunities for cost savings and revenue growth.

Don't forget about those you rely upon: suppliers, alliance partners, channel partners, distributors, and so forth. Create processes that build their consciousness of customers' realities and what they need to do toward your CX excellence goals.

Customer experience governance is one of the FIRST things you should tackle in setting up your CX endeavors — or overhauling them, or updating them for the new fiscal year or quarter. It's actually a quite exciting component of CX management, one that requires a lot of strategic thinking and creative solutions.

Notes:

1. 1. Customer Experience Governance is part of Organizational Adoption and Accountability, one of the six domains in the body of knowledge advocated by the CXPA. (ClearAction offers a CCXP Exam Prep Course.)
2. 2. The concept of "Do This, Not That" is borrowed from the popular book "Eat This, Not That", where the weaknesses of common practices and myths are brought to light and sensible replacements are recommended.

Other articles in this series:

Image purchased under license from Shutterstock.