Amidst a flurry of C-level leaders declaring that their organizations are currently or are becoming customer centric, customer experience (CX) leaders face their biggest battle yet: Making executives in their organization aware of the damaging shadow they as leaders cast on efforts to become more customer obsessed.

My colleague Richard Sheahan and I often talk to CX leaders who are stumped by the hurdles they face in the organization … some of them even despite a generous CX budget. We suggest that this is a consequence of the shadow that executives in the organization cast. And we observe that those executives and sometimes even CX leaders aren’t aware of that shadow. In this blog, we’ll share why we say this. And at the end of the blog you’ll find a tool that Richard first used with clients, which we then developed further and also tested with some CX professionals: A Leadership CX Commitment Checklist that can help you make that shadow visible.

The Reality: Most Organizations Are Not Customer Obsessed

When we look at our data, we see that companies are not customer led:

  • Most companies are not customer obsessed. In the US, only 3% of business, IT, and marketing executives are from organizations that qualify as fully customer obsessed, according to Forrester’s State Of Customer Obsession Survey, 2022. The comparable number for EMEA is 2%.
  • Customers’ experiences are not excellent. No single brand included in Forrester’s Customer Experience Benchmark Survey, 2022, fielded in the US and EMEA, received an excellent Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) score in 2022.

The Challenge: Executives Cast A Damaging Shadow, But Many Aren’t Aware

Many leaders seem to believe their love for customers. But their behaviors show they haven’t made customer obsession a part of their identity. They:

  • Focus on short-term revenue gains at the expense of long-term customer loyalty.
  • Hire and promote based on business KPIs, not customer-focused KPIs.
  • Prioritize deadlines over ensuring customer insights are embedded in decision-making.

The Added Challenge: CX Professionals Aren’t Seeing This Shadow Clearly, Either

What’s worse is that many CX leaders don’t seem to believe this shadow exists:

Make The Shadow Visible: Use Our Leadership CX Commitment Checklist 

The dissonance between what leaders think and how they behave is a huge challenge for CX professionals. CX leaders must bridge this gap. How? Confront very senior stakeholders in their organizations, get them to acknowledge that dissonance, and help them understand the shadow they cast. The goal: Get leaders to develop identity-based CX habits.

Our checklist helps. CX leaders should ask leaders’ direct reports to fill in the Leadership CX Commitment Checklist. Then, have a frank discussion about what needs changing.

Leadership commitment checklist. how much and how well do your organization's leaders do this? 1) Spend time with customers (Immerse and learn, then share learnings about customers and their lives); 2) Speak knowledgeably about customers (Prove deep knowledge of target customers and their needs); 3) Address customer queries/issues (Take responsibility for resolving a complaint, for example, to help understand the ecosystem); 5) Recognise customer-centred behaviour in colleagues (Recognise large and small acts by any colleague that demonstrate consideration for colleagues and customers); 6) Start with customer topics in meetings (When — and how high — customers feature on the agendas of company, team, and cross-functional meetings); 7) Spend time in meeting on customer topics (How many minutes (or what share of the time) in a meeting are devoted to talking about customers); 8) Make colleagues feel customer topics are welcome (Ask for input/advice on applying customer-centricity to decisions and priorities); 9) Make short-term sacrifices for CX (Sacrifice short-term financial gain to improve CX); 11) Hire and promote for CX (Balance between attitude/behaviour and performance when recruiting and promoting); 12) Define customer-centric metrics and targets (Define metrics and targets rooted in customer-centric metrics but don’t “pay extra” for CX); 13) Pay attention to customer-focused metrics (Structure/content of leadership dashboard, including more CX metrics); 14) Prioritise insights over timelines (Extend deadlines to ensure customer-centricity); 15) Make changes in response to new insights (Change a plan or approach that they feel strongly about in response to insights about the customer and their CX); 16) Pause ideas that lack evidence of positive customer impact (Send ideas back to the drawing board if there isn’t convincing evidence of a positive impact on customers)

If you want to discuss more, please contact us. And if you want to read more about this topic, check out some of our research on future fit leaders.