Marketers talk about customer experience[1] as making buyers the reference point for activities an organization carries out.
Since customer experience is the sum of all touchpoints[2] a customer has with an organization, the ultimate goal is shaping every single customer interaction to be positive.
However, reaching this objective is challenging, because touchpoints occur throughout the buyer lifecycle or journey: When a customer is planning to buy, during the actual purchase process (whether in a retail store or online), when they use the product, and when seeking post-sales service and support.
Coordinating an organization to create a positive and uniform customer experience may require multiple parts of the company to rethink how they interact with customers. Innovating around customer feedback mechanisms, product design, supply chain, and customer service, for example, often demands significant change.
For large organizations, especially, this transformation can force the company to adopt new processes, technologies, and business models along with changes to employee hiring and training.
Because the enterprise implications are broad, chief marketing officers who drive these initiatives must have a significant footprint across the organization.
The global chief marketing officer[3] at Deloitte, Diana O'Brien[4], has placed customer experience as her top priority. Deloitte is a professional services firm with 270,000 employees and $39 billion in revenue, which makes customer experience transformation a large project indeed.
To explore issues around customer experience and transformation in enterprise marketing, I invited Diana to take part in episode 284[5] of the CXOTalk series of conversations with the world's top innovators.
During our conversation, Diana presents an expansive view of marketing and the CMO role. Her goal is driving organizational