As more and more companies compete on customer experience, the right organisational structure and talent is critical for success. Many businesses are investing in dedicated customer experience (CX) teams to analyse customer feedback, uncover actionable insights, and drive continuous improvement across the enterprise.

But what does an effective CX Team look like?

How should it be structured?

What are the key roles and responsibilities?

While there is no single answer, there are definitely best practices every organisation can leverage. In this post, we’ll explore the essential components of a high-performing CX team.

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Key Takeaways for Designing a High-Impact CX Team

• Unwavering support from the CEO, COO and other C-suite leaders is absolutely essential. Without genuine commitment flowing from the top, efforts to improve customer-centricity will struggle to gain traction.
• Customer-centric values must be consistently understood and embraced by employees at all levels. Aligning your team around a shared mission to delight customers lays the foundation for transformation.
• The CX team’s act as an enabler and centre of excellence – providing the skills, insights and tools to support other departments in implementing CX improvements. With their expertise in customer feedback analysis, journey mapping and experience design, the CX team consults to the rest of the organisation to drive meaningful change.
• Operational departments are ultimately responsible for executing on CX initiatives, as they have the deep domain knowledge of their area of the business.
• CX metrics and KPIs must be established, tracked and tied to remuneration, just like any other critical business area. But take care linking raw scores (NPS, CSAT, etc) directly to remuneration as it can cause unwanted behaviours.
• Consider a steering committee with senior cross-functional representation to maintain alignment and accountability.

The Role of the CX Team

CX teams play a crucial role as the voice of the customer within the organisation. Their primary mission is to analyse customer feedback from various touchpoints, uncover insights, and share those learnings across different departments to drive meaningful improvements in the customer experience.

Enabling Customer Experience Success

The customer experience team should be an enabler or centre of excellence for customer experience management skills and systems within the organisation.

The simple analogy is with the IT or Accounting departments. Accounting is responsible for counting the money, making sure it’s reported accurately, counselling the rest of the organisation on how best to use the money but NOT making sales.  Nobody thinks this is strange.

Customer experience is no different. 

It is a set of skills and systems that is used by the rest of the organisation to improve their individual CX performance. The CX Team should be viewed as “consultants” to the rest of the organisation – people with desired skills and the ability to add real value to the whole process.

Data Analysis Skills

As the centralised repository of customer intelligence, the CX team is responsible for aggregating data from sources such as surveys, customer service interactions, social media sentiment, and user behaviour analytics.

They use a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods to identify patterns, pain points and opportunities in the customer journey.

Change Agents

However, the CX team’s job doesn’t stop at analysis. To be effective change agents, they must also communicate their findings in a way that is compelling and actionable for stakeholders across the organisation. This means going beyond data dumps to craft narratives that build empathy for the customer and create urgency around addressing their needs.

Importantly, the CX team also plays a hands-on role in implementing experience improvements. They may lead experience design projects, develop journey maps to identify process enhancements, or create tools like customer personas and feedback templates. By partnering closely with operational teams, CX experts help to translate insights into tangible changes that improve the customer experience at every touchpoint.

CEO/CxO Support – Not Negotiable

The non-negotiable starting point for any successful customer experience management program is unwavering support from the CEO and other C-suite leaders. Without genuine belief in the profit-driving power of CX flowing from the top, efforts to improve customer focus are doomed to die a slow, unbudgeted death.

Full support from senior executives goes beyond rubber-stamping CX budgets or paying lip service to customer-centric values. The CEO/COO must visibly champion the idea that superior customer experience is a key source of competitive advantage, not just a feel-good initiative. They must reinforce this in their communications, resource allocation decisions, and by modelling customer-centric behaviours.

Only when leaders walk the talk will CX be embraced as a strategic priority across the organisation.

Companies like CyberCX show what is possible when the CEO/COO makes CX a top imperative, uniting all employees in the mission to delight customers.

The C-Level Must Convey Clear Customer Centric Values

As a sub-topic, the organisation must have consistent and simple to understand customer-centric values that are genuinely held by staff and senior management. If you can ingrain this into the organisation, the rest of the process will be simpler. Think Disney or Apple.

Roles in the Customer Experience Team

Having a customer experience function in a company is a relatively new concept and as a result the roles and titles of team members is still evolving.

Newer CX roles emerging include Chief Experience Officers, Customer Retention Leads, Omni-Channel CX Directors, and Customer Lifecycle Managers.

But while the exact composition of a CX team will vary based on company size and industry, there are several common roles that are essential for driving customer-centric change.

At the helm is typically a CX leader or manager, who is responsible for setting the overall vision and strategy for the customer experience. This person must have a deep understanding of CX best practices and be skilled at influencing cross-functional stakeholders to rally around customer needs.

Another key role is the Voice of Customer (VOC) manager, who owns the process of gathering, analysing and sharing customer feedback. This person is often supported by a team of data analysts who help to uncover insights from both structured and unstructured data sources.

Experience design specialists use customer insights to create detailed journey maps, develop user personas, and design intuitive, seamless experiences across touchpoints. They may come from backgrounds in UX design, service design or design thinking.

Rounding out the core CX team are often customer success managers. These individuals are responsible for proactively engaging with customers to ensure they are realising value, identifying upsell opportunities and mitigating churn risk. They serve as a valuable source of frontline feedback and often partner with the VOC team on closed-loop follow up.

How the CX Team Integrates With the Rest of the Organisation

Of course the CX Team doesn’t live in isolation – it can only be successful by working with and through the rest of the organisational structure to deliver a seamless, cohesive journey.

For example, the CX team should collaborate closely with:

• Marketing to ensure that brand promises and customer expectations set through marketing communications are actually fulfilled in the customer experience. The CX team can provide valuable insights to inform marketing strategies and campaigns.
• Sales to understand customer needs, preferences, and pain points uncovered during the sales process. These insights can help the CX team identify opportunities to improve the purchase experience and post-sale support.
• Product Development to share customer feedback and feature requests that can guide product roadmaps and innovations. By representing the voice of the customer, the CX team can help prioritise development efforts based on real user needs.
• Customer Service to analyse customer interactions, identify common issues, and implement process improvements to reduce friction and increase satisfaction. Service agents are a valuable source of frontline feedback for the CX team.

Effective cross-functional collaboration requires having the right communication channels, processes, and governance in place. The CX team should lead regular cross-departmental meetings to share customer insights, align on CX initiatives, and track progress against shared goals.

Some best practices for fostering collaboration include:

• Establishing a steering committee with representation from each department to oversee the CX program
• Creating journey maps that define roles and responsibilities for each touchpoint
• Implementing a centralised platform for capturing and sharing customer feedback across the organisation
• Tying CX metrics and incentives to cross-functional goals to encourage teamwork
• Celebrating wins and showcasing examples of successful collaboration

CX Team Operating Best Practices

In terms of process implementation, there are some gems of insight in the comments.

Operational Departments Implement

Operational Departments are responsible for implementing CX improvements. They have the critical departmental domain experience to understand their business better than anyone else. The CX team (see below) understands CX, and has the tools to support the Operational Departments in implementation.

At the end of the day, the buck stops with the people that know their part of the business the best.

Customer Experience KPIs are Required

Operational Departments must have customer experience based KPIs. These are rolled down from the C-suite and go hand in hand with the standard KPIs they have.

The key understanding here is that CX KPIs are not just an interesting diversion – they are profit lead  indicators.  That is the key importance of, for instance, Net Promoter Score.  It’s not just interesting, it leads revenue growth. It goes without saying that the CX KPIs should be connected to remuneration in the same way that the other KPIs are connected to remuneration.

Hot Desking

If the CX Department is large enough, consider having them hot desk around the organisation to become ingrained in the business.

Reporting

Where does the CX team report?  

This varies but is generally either directly to a “C” level executive, even the CEO, or into Marketing.  Personally, I am less keen on having it roll into Marketing.

As noted above with the sharing of KPIs, the customer experience team is not solely responsible for the customer experience as this will relieve responsibility from the Operational Departments.

How Big Should the CX Team Be?

The size of the CX team: This group does not have to be large. 

It can be as small as an outsourced consultant to the CEO and up to 20 people for the largest of organisations.

Business Silos

Cross-customer product silos can be of particular issue.  Consider banks that have mortgage, transaction accounts, personal loans, credit monitoring services, etc., all interacting with the customer..  These organisations have a particular issue and often the silos will need to report to the same person to allow a customer focus to override the product silo focus.

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