leading experience: 5 reasons to hire (or become) a chief experience officer

Leading Brand Experience:5 Reasons to Hire (Or Become) A CXO

Companies put Cs in front of executives names to denote leadership of something thats so mission critical, it just has to be led with singular vision. Its important in a capital C, core-to-strategy kind of way. Were all pretty clear that the best-known chiefs (CTOs, CFOs, CMOs, etc.) are empowered to lead functions without which the company couldnt be successfulfunctions that can only be leveraged if led with central purpose and clarity. We understand that technology, finance, marketing and the other c areas are important enough to be assigned to a leader rather than dispersed across the organization, left open to interpretation or chance. These are areas that we know merit and require leadership. The same is increasingly true of the new C in town: Chief Experience Officer. Experiencedefined as the interactions between the company and the people that make its business workis truly mission-critical, deserving the full power and authority of a c-level owner. And experience covers a lot of territory: how people shop for a brands products, how they interact with the company to get

/25 Reasons to Hire (Or Become) A CXO

First off: whats a CXO?

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help or buy more, how the company distinguishes itself through its behaviors and actions in the marketplace. As those interactions have become more complex, as customer journeys have become subject to ever greater pressure and competition , as technology has continued to fuel innovation as well as fragmentation at the core of brand interactions, its no surprise that companies are increasingly hiring executives to own and champion experience. Although companies have formerly thought of this role as Chief Customer Officer , increasingly theyre defining the function around experience, which recognizes not only its strong relationship to brand but also the huge role of internal culture and employee engagement in customer experience. Experience is simply too important to companies success to leave it to chance. Enter the CXO.


Case in point: nine out of ten consumers say that they choose brands on the basis of the overall experience; six in ten say theyll pay more for a brand that offers a unique experience. Better experience has been correlated to higher purchase intent, decreased customer churn and greater word of mouth awareness.

Beyond preference, superior experience is correlated to performance. Over a five-year period, companies with superior experiences beat so-called experience laggardsand the S&P 500 Indexon stock performance.

Its simple: CXOs help companies make more money (ka-ching!) and have a big role to play moving forward.

Research as well as common sense affirm that improving how people experience your brand will increase satisfaction and lead to more profitable relationships on all sides.

Hire a CXO because a better experience will give you a competitive edge.

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Yet turning saying into doing is hard. Its one thing to say in your branding or above the line advertising that you make life easy for your customers, and a different thing entirely to deliver on that promise across every interaction. It takes leadership by someone whos a true believer in your brand as a verb.

Few companies can take for granted that they dont need this kind of leadership: theres a huge gap between potential and actual performance when it comes to experience. Bain & Company surveyed customers of 362 companies and found that although only 8% of customers described their experiences as superior, 80% of the companies claimed to be at that level.

Experience is important, its hard and it needs champions.

Actions speak louder than words is a truism that applies to brands as well as people. However brilliant your brand design, positioning and purpose, what does it matter if your brand doesnt behave as promised? It has to. Because thats what people remember and act on (see reason #1). Your brand is a verb, not a noun.

Hire a CXO because you need a leader to champion doing versus saying .

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One of the reasons you need someone to own experience is that currently, its likely that everyone (and no one) does.

Think of customers calling into your call centers. To minimize the number of unhappy incoming calls product people need to deliver, marketing has to make achievable promises and the billing department must provide accurate information in a user-friendly way. To ensure that customers hang up happy, you need your training team to teach staff to listen, your sales team to help them convert more buyers and your marketing department to give them tools to talk about current advertising and promotions. Across everything, you need HR to build processes that reward on-brand behaviors. And on top of all that, you need technology so seamlessly integrated into the customers experience that they dont even notice it. Thats a lot to put together to create a positive customer experience around the call centerand its just one tiny piece of the customer experience.

Across all the teams that impact experience, the CXO needs to function as the ultimate champion of collaboration to reach the goal of a better brand experience.

Hire a CXO because operationalizing your brand as verb requires epic levels of collaboration.

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Big data is the buzzword du jour (case in point: it was the subject of 112 million blog posts in 2012 ). With good reason: theres immense power in marketers ability to gather and use information about consumers purchasing and online behaviors to design better experiencesmore relevant, more timely, more useful. Do that, and you will see a return.

So its no surprise that theres big growth in the big data sector: by 2017, CMOs are expected to spend more on IT than CIOs, and total spend will reach $50 billion. But data is only as big as its application. Its of limited value if its not actually applied. Information about consumers preferences and habits that simply sits in spreadsheets is useless; information that just fuels targeted ads can make the brand feel creepy and invasive. But using that data to design better brand experiences? Brilliant.

Taking big data to this levelwhere it shapes experiencewill require effective collaborators and leaders (see #3 above) such as CXOs. Truly leveraging big data in ways that drive better experiencesboth by input and by outputrequires the kind of vision and purpose that an experience champion can bring.

Did someone say big data ?

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But short attention spans contradict the enduring commitment needed to build a brand experience culture. And thats where CXOs come in.

It takes time to define how your brand should behave in the marketplace. It takes time to audit and understand how your brand is behaving across the touchpoints you already have. It takes time to create experiences that connect your brand in new ways. And it takes time to train (and retrain) your people to deliver your brand as verb through their actions and across your culture. All that requires an in-it-for-the-long-haul commitment to put the brand experience in placeand then continue to measure, improve and refresh over time.

Marketers have a reputation for falling in love with the next big thingover and over again. No surprise there, really, since to do our jobs well (especially on the agency side) we need to combine deep expertise with passionate curiosity and an abiding interest in being way ahead of whats already happening. That tends to cultivate short attention spans.

Hire a CXO because building a brand experience culture takes time.

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Ironically, the most admired chiefs of experience never had that title. But its not about the titleits about the commitment to putting experience at the center. In the category of a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, these three experience champions impact clearly shows what an experience leader can do for your organization:

Steve JobsRecall Apples foundational innovation in user-centered design. Remember Jobs near obsessive management of the details of experiencespanning product to packaging to staff to advertising. The chief-iest Chief Experience Officer in history, even without the title.

Howard SchultzHe turned coffee shops into a transformative third space yet has never taken the Starbucks experience for grantedits in a perpetual state of tweaking, with innovation across every touchpoint. Again, hes the CEO, not the CXO, but its clear he believes in the brand as verb.

The CXO hall of fame or, a rose by any other name.


Tony HsiehHes called a chief happiness officer. But whatever his title, as CEO of Zappos.com, hes evangelized the importance of internal company culture to external customer experience. Its a simple premise but an authentically delivered promise that truly differentiates the online retailers brand experience.

[Insert your name here]Its a big aspiration but a clear way to have a lasting impact on your organization. Why not?

Footnotes1. Admittedly, there is that lingering vogue for self-consciously quirky c-level titles that dates back to the first dot com go-go days (yes, we remember). In the inimitable words of New York Times columnist Stuart Elliott, During the dot-com boom, titles like marketing sherpa were being handed out like cents-off coupons for Swiffer at Safeway. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/13/business/media/13adco.html?_r=0

2. See our article on The Experience Journey: http://www.slideshare.net/jackmortonWW/experience-journey

3. Paul Hagen, The Rise of the Chief Customer Officer, Harvard Business Review blog: http://blogs.hbr.org/2011/04/the-rise-of-the-chief-customer/

4. Best Experience Brands: A Global Study by Jack Morton (2013): http://www.slideshare.net/jackmortonWW/best-experience-brands

5. Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, Outside In: The Power of Putting the Customer at the Center of Your Business (2012).

6. Watermark Consulting Analysis of CXi and Stock Performance, cited in Outside In.

7. Christopher Meyer and Andre Schwager, Understanding Customer Experience, Harvard Business Review (2007) http://hbr.org/2007/02/understanding-customer-experience/ar/1

8. IBM, Tuning Into Big Data as the Buzz Gets Louder: http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/infographic/tuning-big-data-buzz-gets-louder

9. Laura McLellan, Gartner webinar, January 2012: http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=202&mode=2&PageID=5553&resId=1871515&ref=Webinar-Calendar


Contact: Liz BighamE: [email protected]: +1 212 401 7212

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About Jack MortonJack Morton Worldwide is a global brand experience agency with offices on five continents. Our agency culture promotes breakthrough ideas about how experiences connect brands and peoplein person, online, at retail and through the power of digital and word of mouth influence. We work with clients to create powerful and effective experiences that engage customers and consumers, launch products, align employees and build strong experience brands. Ranked at the top of our field, weve earned hundreds of awards for creativity, execution and effectiveness.

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