In July we set out to understand the current roles, responsibilities and challenges of Customer Experience managers across Australia. The results of this survey are we think the first of its kind in the country... 

Customer Experience Management is still far from mature in Australia. There are some positive signs of growing maturity, with respect to the growing seniority and influence of customer managers. However, in many cases the customer experience (CX) function has still to prove itself and faces challenges in linking outcomes to financial benefits or in achieving real culture change. Companies vary widely in their knowledge, approach and abilities in customer management, and given uncertain and probably leaner economic times ahead, many will lack the ability to retain and deepen customer relationships sufficiently to maintain their growth or defend their markets. In order to fulfil the full potential of the role, companies will need to focus on: 

1. Improving their ability to prove the financial benefits of customer experience work.
2. Improving their ability to engage with employees and achieve customer-centric culture change from the top-down.
3. Overcoming skills shortages, given the breadth of skills and experience required to improve customer experience (from strategy to design to project, process and people change).

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Extracts of Results

Role: About half of Australian companies (who responded to the survey) have a dedicated customer experience manager, with a title which reflects that specialist responsibility. The other half doesn’t have a ‘customer experience manager’ as such, but cover those responsibilities through another role, e.g. Director of Marketing, Service etc. Whether or not there is a dedicated CX manager, most companies see CX responsibility belonging to someone either directly reporting to the CEO, or one level down. But approximately a quarter either have lower level management working on CX, or have no focus on it at all.

Measures: Customer satisfaction or loyalty is the most common KPI for CX leaders, though measures linked to project outcomes, complaints or resolution, costs, retention and revenue are also quite common. Around 2/3^rds of companies also use the same metrics at exec levels to improve company performance in an effective manner. (Though of course that means 1/3^rd do not).

Structure & Responsibilibites: CX team structure varies company to company, and there is no dominant approach used in Australia. The most common structure is to align the team to company business units, e.g. sales, marketing, service etc. However many  teams stucture by skills (e.g. strategy, design, analysts etc) and some by segment (e.g. business, consumer, etc). CX team responsibilities also vary widely, but over 75% are responsible for tracking and gaining insights from customer feedback (the most common responsibility). Following that, activities related to maintaining and improving customer quality, external research, customer strategy, design, culture/training and other improvement projects are the most frequent CX team responsibiilties.

Challenges: Recruiting for CX team members is moderately difficult, especially for design and project staff, and strategists. Skills shortages are the main barrier to recruitment (but not pay, or the attractiveness of role or company, for example). And the main challenges facing CX managers? The top challenge is to prove the benefits of improving customer experience, closely followed by the ‘people’ challenges of employee engagement and culture change. The most common current projects concern improving customer feedback, measures and VOC programs, (though these are not listed as major challenges).