Hi Eileen
The problem with putting all aspects of the customer experience - from marketing , through sales, to service and operations - into it is that all these other disciplines are well established, both in how they operate and in how they contribute to SHV. Customer experience has neither of these advantages. It is for this reason that the CXO role rarely has responsibility for the other disciplines and often plays the role of Chief Collaboration Officer instead.
Would you give responsibility for business success to a new discipline that had no power base and cannot show how it drives SHV? I wouldn't. I strongly suspect no sane person would.
Best regards, Graham

Hi Jack
Thanks for writing such an interesting article.
From my perspective, advertising, marketing and customer experience all fulfil different, but complementary roles. That means each will continue but that they should be better integrated.
Advertising's role is to create markets. Marketing's is to generate demand. The customer experience's is to facilitate consumption. Thirty years of research into the Marketing Effies, (see the various publications of Binet & Fields), suggests most companies would be well advised to spend 60-70% of their Marketing budget on advertising and 30-40% on marketing. Whereas there is ample evidence that advertising and marketing drive SHV, the evidence that customer experience directly drives SHV is much much weaker. So how much should we spend on customer experience? And where should the budget come from?
Best regards, Graham

Hi Neil
I think you came to the same conclusion that I did.
While CX drives SHV is still an inadequately proven hypothesis, any company wishing to make a considered bet on CX by introducing the CXO role, should protect their current business performance by putting a proven, commercially-minded person into the role.
In other words, to expand the role of the CMO to include CX as well. Whether you now call them the CXO or not is moot, the key things is their focus on those customer facing activities that drive SHV.
Best regards, Graham

Further Reading:
There are dozens of articles and reports on NBAs on the Internet. Sadly, most are sales collateral from RTIM vendors looking to sell you their products and SI consultants looking to sell your their services. They are all rather superficial and unsatisfying, as befits sales collateral.
If you want to learn anything useful about the process of defining, designing, developing and delivering NBAs you have to look elsewhere.
One of the most interesting papers I have read recently was João Luís Trindade Milheiro 2019 Masters thesis on 'Next Best Action – a Data-Driven Marketing Approach' (https://run.unl.pt/bitstream/10362/92945/1/TAA0044.pdf).
If you are tired of reading superficial sales collateral and want to know a little more about how to bootstrap an NBA for real, you should read his thesis. It isn't very long. It is a fascinating read.

Hi Neil
Thanks for a well written article that covers the ground from different perspectives. I would expect nothing less from a professional journalist like yourself.
If there is one question you should ask to decide who should own the customer - which is what this is really about - it is who makes the biggest contribution to increased profits, reduced costs, reduced risk and increased competitiveness, in other words, to SHV. Ownership of the customer and control over the different aspects of the end-to-end experience should go to the role that makes the biggest contribution to SHV. It really is that simple.
At the moment, the CX drives SHV proposition is a hypothesis with relatively weak evidence to support it. The Marketing drives SHV proposition, on the other hand, is a well established fact that gathers USD Billions in funding in contemporary business . Those companies that put Marketing under the new CXO role, particularly where the CXO doesn't control all of the interactions in the end-to-end experience, are putting what they think ought to work before what we know does work. They are making an expensive and perhaps disastrous bet.
Are you a betting man Neil? Would you bet the future of your company on CX?
Best regards, Graham

Hi Chris
An interesting article.
But it is based on an alien and one might say, sometimes self-delusional American view of culture. In this view, the leader decides what the culture will be and through his heroic efforts, persuades others to follow. That works well in blockbuster films, (that follow Joe Campbell's monomyth of the 'Hero's Journey'), but it doesn't work well in the real world, where culture isn't set by the leader, but is 'how we do things around here'.
In any organisation other than startup or small family firm, the culture will almost certainly be set by employees, not by management. And different groups of employees may have different sub-cultures too. As will merged organisations.
To be useful, a real world culture book will be about employees and their behaviours, not about management and its wishes.
Best regards, Graham
PS. I note that Zappos implementation of Holacracy hasn't been a smooth ride for Hsieh.
Why Are So Many Zappos Employees Leaving?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/zappos-holacracy-hi...
A hard lesson for the sometimes self-delusional American model of heroic leadership to think about.

Hi Jeremie
An interesting and thorough article.
It raises three questions.
Firstly, CPA is based entirely on historical data. It tells you nothing about the future. How can you calculate a 'future CPA'? You should be investing in customers that will bring you the highest return in the future; you can't do anything about customers in the past.
Secondly, CPA ignores risk and competitive advantage period; two factors that feature strongly in most SHV models. How can you adjust CPA for risk and CAP? Minimising risk and maximising CAP will both increase your CPA.
And finally, CPA ignores leverage. How can you report CPA differently so that it helps identify which groups of customers can be influenced to change their behaviour in a more profitably direction? As Mr Orwell would have said, 'all customers are equal, but some are more equal than others!'
Best regards, Graham

Further Reading:
As we gather more data and the tools to analyse the interactions that customers are engaged in in real-time, the better we are able to understand what is happening through measuring customers' behaviour and to dynamically adapt to make them better.
This requires a very different type of service experience design, one based on a further degree of unbundling than I describe in my post (and enabling journey orchestration technologies).
Gary Batroff, describes the opportunity in a recent article on...
'Introducing Silent Loops for Survey Non-Responders'
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/silent-loops-survey-non-responders-gary-b...
Best regards, Graham

Hi Ricardas
How do you account for Binet & Field's findings from 30 years and over 1,000 campaigns entered into the Marketing Effectiveness awards that reach beats acquisition, and that both beat loyalty hands down.
Binet & Field
'Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era'
https://cdn.thearf.org/ARF_Knowledgebase/ARF%20Audience%20Measurement/Ax...
See 'Reach is King' on slide 8
Best regards, Graham

Yet More Reading:
Parasuraman et al describe the relative importance of factors like Reliability, Assurance, Responsiveness, Tangibles and Empathy on service quality in their 1988 paper...
'SERVQUAL: A Multiple-Item Scale for Measuring Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality'
http://healthpartners.chistjosephhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/P...
Every #CX practitioner should know the #SERVQUAL model