The Data

According to this survey, Marketers are not now really “responsible”  for the customer experience (whatever responsible means in this context) but will be over the next 3 years.  If it was just the vendor (Marketo) trumpeting this idea, I’d be more skeptical.  But this vendor hired the Intelligence Unit from The Economist organization to do this work and the report includes the actual questions, meaning you can check for bias.  Population is 478 CMO’s and senior marketing executives worldwide, seems decent / not cherry-picked.

So I will cut the vendor some slack.   Questions though, right?  Just what is customer experience, in particular for the purposes of success measurement?  How does it fit with related ideas like Customer Journey / LifeCycle and Engagement?  Certainly if the above is a significant macro trend we ought to sort this all out first?  And of course, putting some analytical rigor (structure, process, and definitions?) in place to support the effort ;)

The Story

I know a lot of marketing people who have either had this authority for years (multi-channel database marketing) or are moving in this direction, so the results make sense to me.  To be clear(er), “experience” for these people reaches all the way back from UX into fulfillment and service.  So when they talk about experience, they are talking visitor and customer; not just navigation and landing pages, but also shipping times and return rates.

Perhaps increased access to customer data is revealing the significant impact customer experience in this larger sense has on long-term customer value?  This idea, coupled with increased focus on accountability (also covered in the survey) could be driving this trend.

Worth the read, only 20 pages long with a lot of charts.  Here’s 4 snippets to hook you:

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