Lynn Hunsaker
Member Since: 2nd Dec 2009
Lynn Hunsaker, Customer Experience Transformation Strategist, is head of ClearAction, Marketing Operations Partners, and the Marketing Future Forum. She has developed and led customer experience transformation for more than half of her career, as Voice of the Customer Manager, Strategic Information Manager, and Market Research Consultant, and in executive roles such as Head of Corporate Quality and Director of Marketing & Business Development at Fortune 250 companies.
Clients include Accountants Inc, Adecco, Adobe, Allegion, Anritsu, Applied Materials, Bankers Fidelity, Cadence, Cementos Progreso, Cementos Progreso, Cisco, Critical Software, Deltek, Direct General Insurance, FormFactor, Hootsuite, Hospira, Ingersoll Rand, Kaiser Permanente, LexisNexis, Merck, MicroWarehouse, Moo, SHRM, SunPower, Thomson Reuters, Valin, Whataburger, and others.
Lynn is past president of Silicon Valley American Marketing Association and she has taught marketing, advertising and business courses for 5 years at UC Berkeley Extension, Mission College and San Jose State University. Lynn earned psychology and marketing degrees at BYU and an MBA at Vanderbilt University. She is a Certified Marketing Manager, Certified Quality Manager, Certified Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Practitioner, and Certified Customer Experience Professional.
She is a top-10 CustomerThink author and she has written three handbooks: Metrics You Can Manage For Success, Customer Experience Improvement Momentum, and Innovating Superior Customer Experience. She designed and conducted the world's first global B2B customer experience management practices study for 5 years, and she led the world's first marketing operations practices study.
Lynn's Customer Experience Excellence course was the first to be recognized by CXPA as an Authorized Resource & Training provider for its Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) exam. She has served as a CXPA CX Expert panelist and as a co-chair of numerous CXPA committees.
My discussion replies
Customer experience management should be owned by all employees, as their processes, policies, hand-offs, attitudes, and daily decisions have a ripple effect on customer-facing employees, and ultimately, on end-user customers as well. As such, you should stream relevant customer feedback data to every department and integrate customer experience improvement actions into their day-to-day work.
Businesses exist to serve a customer need, which results in a profitable revenue stream. As such, there's nothing more important than customer experience management (CEM) to be championed by the entire executive team. Some companies establish a VP-level Chief Customer Officer (CCO), but whoever guides the company's CEM business processes should be a catalyst and facilitator for enterprise-wide engagement in CEM. I've seen a lot of CCO's agendas relegated primarily to customer acquisition or revenue growth, which is a huge mistake. Marketing, and Sales in particular, already have customer acquisition emphasis. Most CEM efforts in place are non-integrated revenue-oriented programs from earlier customer satisfaction, loyalty, engagement, and CRM initiatives. What's missing, typically, and necessary for the CCO to champion, is truly customer-centric culture, and ongoing scrutiny of business processes and policies for full alignment with customer priorities and customer experience innovation opportunities.
-- Lynn Hunsaker is a Customer Experience Strategist, and head of ClearAction customer experience management consulting. She specializes in customer-centric culture, customer experience innovation, and employee engagement in customer experience optimization.