Why It’s So Important That Someone Own Customer Experience

Our Town Hall discussion last week was on customer journey mapping, coming off our recent report on the subject. One of the attendees posed an interesting question about customer experience (CX) within an organization: Who owns it?

As we found in this week’s Research Council Survey report, responsibility for CX varies between insurers—at times falling to marketing, IT, digital, customer service, or other teams. Some insurers also noted a collaborative approach to CX, with joint ownership or a center of excellence (COE).

Whether IT, digital, marketing, or a COE own CX is less important than the fact that someone owns it. 14% of life insurers and 9% of P/C admitted that no one owns CX within the organization.

It’s not that insurers are apathetic toward customer experiences. Instead, it may be that confusion over who the customer is—agents or policyholders—makes it difficult for teams to take responsibility. Even if the organization agrees that policyholders are the customer, insurers might feel that ownership of CX is more appropriate to give to agents, whom they perceive, rightly or wrongly, to be closer to the customer.

Whatever the rationale, insurer ownership of CX is important for three reasons:

1. Point of Contact: Many different teams provide touchpoints for customers, from quoting and underwriting to claims and renewals. Insurers need to have a single point of contact to ensure that customers have a consistent experience across a continuous journey and that they can address friction in the experience holistically.
2. Accountability for Success: Measuring positive customer experiences is not necessarily straightforward. It involves customer feedback analysis, net promoter scores, favorability metrics, social media monitoring, journey analytics, completion rates, call center data, or other business metrics. Orchestrating these metrics to see a complete picture of the customer needs to be someone’s responsibility.
3. Budget for CX Tech: There are dozens of enterprise-level CX engineering and management tools on the market today, made possible by advances in personalization, cloud-based data activation, and advanced analytics. Insurers should start to explore these tools to compete effectively, and someone needs to own that budget.

It’s a mistake to ignore CX or delegate its ownership to intermediaries. To no one is customer loyalty more important than the brand, which is why someone in the organization needs to own, measure, and curate that relationship.