How Can CIOs Improve Company Stock Performance? Transform the CX

Customer Experience is often hard to quantify. Everyone can clearly articulate a positive customer experience and the companies that do it well.  Zappos, Jet Blue and Discover all come to mind.  On the opposite end of the spectrum many of us have had similar horror stories with K-Mart, Frontier Airlines and Comcast.  

But does good CX actually produce a quantifiable return?  The answer is yes.  

Forrester has been publishing an index of CX leaders and laggards by industry for quite some time.  The graph above is telling.  It shows a greater than 80% difference in stock performance between the best and the worst in the industry.

From a digital standpoint, the responsibility for CX is often split between two camps. The CMO typically owns the prospective customer experience, or the "front-end" of the customer journey.  This is how the brand is perceived when experienced through search, social, content campaigns, the public dot-com experience, etc.  The conversation is typically one way (from the brand to the customer) and the value the customer receives through these interactions is limited.  

But the CIO often owns the  "back-end" of the customer journey.  This is the experience the customer has "behind the login".  These interactions are typically bi-directional (the customer providing information and the brand responding). The value the customer receives from these experiences is much greater and they have a much larger impact on whether a customer becomes a promoter or a detractor.

CMOs are usually great at focusing on the CX. CIOs are typically not. This is why, with most brands, the image you have of a brand through their commercials and online campaigns looks very different than the experience you have logging into one of their apps or online services.  This is true in the B2C space but even more exacerbated in the B2B space.

There is a great opportunity here for CIOs.  CIOs can move their organization from Cost Center to Company Differentiator by consciously upgrading their digital CX to provide a consistent set of interactions from the front-end of the journey, to the back. They can stop focusing on maintaining systems of transactions and start creating systems of experience.  

This expands to front line employees as well (point of sale, point of service, point of care, etc.).  Think of a trip to the doctor's office.  The customer journey starts with booking an appointment, continues into the waiting room and registration counter, extends into the exam room and finally ends with seeing the doctor. But the doctor is on her own journey. It starts when she wakes up in the morning to check her schedule, continues as she reviews a chart before walking in to see a patient, moves on to seeing the patient, researching a potential diagnosis, and writing a prescription. The point is this, the better the doctor's journey is, the better the patient's will be. And this journey is typically owned by the CIO.  This concept extends to B2B sales folks, field agents, store workers and financial advisors.   

If the CIO really wants to make a difference for their brand, the CX is where they should focus their attention and their budgets.  The return is quantifiable and their customers, employees (and stockholders), will thank them for it.