Large firms see customer experience as a marketing initiative, new study finds

The latest research from the CMO Council has found that many senior business executives in large organisations believe it to be the role of their marketing department to have ownership of the customer experience.

The study, Rate the state of Marketing: A C-Suite Scorecard, asks executive-level leaders to analyse the role of the marketing department within their businesses.

It revealed a number of interesting findings, including that 69% of business executives have high levels of confidence in marketing’s ability to lead growth recovery in 2021.

46% rated their marketing team’s performance as very good or exceptional in 2020.

But perhaps the most fascinating statistic is that well over half of executives in large businesses stated they felt their marketing leaders were in charge of overseeing customer experience success in their business.

62% of the survey’s respondents considering the essential role of the CMO as “customer experience advocate and champion” in their organisation.

They also ranked “customer acquisition and profitability” and “customer satisfaction and retention” as two of the three most important KPIs for measuring marketing value.

In comparison, executive respondents to the survey from small businesses said “brand reputation” was the marketing leader’s number one prerogative and that growth and revenue were more important KPIs.   

“Business leaders appear to have more confidence in marketing leadership with 62 percent of survey respondents considering the essential role of the CMO as ‘customer experience advocate and champion’ in their organization,” notes Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, which has 16,000 members in 10,000 companies worldwide.

“The fact that the secondary view of CMOs is ‘digital transformation/marketing automation leader’ is also a real plus give the modernization mandate in a digitally connected world.”

The marketing department has a strong legacy of involvement with customer experience programmes, and in a survey of CMOs and senior marketing executives conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in 2016, the vast majority – 86% - expressed a belief that marketing would own the customer experience by 2020.

The CMO Council’s research chimes with 2020 MyCustomer research, Rise of the Customer Experience Leader, which found that 22% of all customer experience leaders had marketing backgrounds, with 22% stating a customer service background.