Why Customer Experience is Every Retail Leader’s Job

All too often, customer experience is a vague, broad business goal. It’s siloed into marketing or customer support, and leaders struggle to measure impact and prioritize customer experience investments. Despite the fact that customer experience directly impacts revenue, customer happiness, and brand recognition, companies continue to have trouble integrating customer experience initiatives across the organization.

‍Gartner released a comprehensive customer experience report that outlines how business leaders should use a hierarchy of metrics to find problems, measure results, and evaluate customer experience as a whole.

The big conclusion?—Customer experience isn’t a job for one person or one team. Instead, it’s an essential part of every leader’s job.

We’ve culled some insights from the report about how C-suite executives, CX leaders, and others within an organization should think about customer experience.

Understanding Gartner’s hierarchy of CX metrics.

According to Gartner, customer experience metrics can be organized in a four-level hierarchy. This model serves to help you “analyze, produce, and distribute the right CX metrics to the right people within your organization.”The report notes that the metrics are not necessarily different. It’s more about how different people within the organization use them. If the key players within your organization understand where they fit into the overall CX strategy, the more likely they are to be successful.

How different roles use CX metrics.

The C-Suite — Level One is made up of C-suite executives who are responsible for business outcomes.

According to Gartner, this group is responsible for measuring “organizational maturity and sustainability of a customer-centric culture.”

This group is likely to review customer experience metrics quarterly or annually. Rather than focusing on moving the needle, this group is responsible for inspiring a customer-centricity throughout the organization.

‍CX Leaders — Level Two is made up of CX leaders, such as a CMO or CCO who are responsible for strategic levers and macro performance. This group measures “performance of cross-functional customer experience efforts.”

In particular, this group focuses on the overall goals of customer satisfaction, advocacy, and loyalty. Depending on business goals, this group will adjust their tactics to meet them. Often times, this group will focus on areas like customer retention, business performance, and overall spending habits.

‍CX Managers & Team Members — Level Three is made up of CX managers and other team members who are responsible for operational levers and diagnostics. This group diagnoses “cross-functional CX opportunities along the Buy/Own/Advocate customer journey.” This group will use metrics to improve satisfaction at each touchpoint in the customer journey.

‍Operational Leaders Across The Organization — Level Four is made up of operational leaders across the organization. This group “measures CX performance of portions of the organization, allowing leaders to monitor, diagnose and solve for granular CX issues.”

This group looks for the most specific issues, and will focus on efficiency and effectiveness metrics.

CX throughout the organization.

Although each group within the organization has different responsibilities, they can all turn to the same metric to inform their strategy. For example, The Net Promoter Score (NPS) can be used in a variety of ways:

• Level Two can use the overall score to create new strategies.
• CX leaders in Level Three can use the NPS score for a key point in a customer journey.
• A product manager in Level Four can use the NPS score to inform customer satisfaction for a certain product.

It’s obvious that customer experience is not one person’s job. In order to have a customer-centric organization, you need all levels of the hierarchy working together to achieve your CX goals.

‍For more strategies on how to reach your customer experience goals, take a look at our guide Connecting with Shoppers in the Age of Choice.