Customer experience is everybody's job, which means nobody owns it!
Most businesses would say customer experience matters. Few would say it belongs to one department. And that is where the problem can start. When customer experience becomes everybody’s responsibility, it can very easily become nobody’s responsibility. Marketing attracts the customer. Sales converts them. Operations delivers the service. Finance handles payment. Customer service deals with problems. Digital manages the website. Each team can be doing its own job perfectly well while the overall customer experience remains frustrating.
Having worked across marketing, business development, customer engagement, start-ups and public services, including my current work in Kent, I’ve become increasingly convinced of one thing: Customers don't experience departments. They experience journeys. That is also why the role of a customer experience manager should extend far beyond dealing with complaints or measuring satisfaction.
What should a customer experience manager actually manage?
The clue is in the word experience. Think about an ordinary customer journey. Someone sees an advert, visits a website, makes an enquiry, receives a response, books or buys something, receives the service and perhaps contacts the organisation afterwards. Internally, that journey might cross five teams and three different systems.
To the customer, it's one experience. If the website promises something the operational team can't deliver, that's not a marketing problem to the customer. If somebody completes an online form and nobody responds, they don't care which team's inbox it went into. If they're passed between departments three times and have to explain the same problem each time, they don't see three departments trying to help. They see one organisation making life difficult. Whether you're a customer experience manager in Kent, London or anywhere else, that distinction matters.
Customers don't care about your organisational structure
Businesses need departments. Somebody has to own marketing, finance, operations, technology and customer service. The mistake is assuming the customer journey should follow the same structure. It rarely does. I've worked across commercial businesses, start-ups and large public-sector organisations.
Their scale, objectives and customers can be very different, but I've repeatedly encountered the same underlying challenge. A process can make perfect sense internally while making very little sense to the person using it. That's why I've always been interested in what happens between functions. What happens after marketing generates the enquiry? Who owns the handover? What information follows the customer? Where does responsibility change? What happens when something goes wrong? And, critically, who notices when the journey isn't working? Customer experience needs ownership. This doesn't mean simply appointing a Customer Experience Manager and assuming the problem is solved.
A job title isn't ownership
Accountability is. Someone needs to look across the complete customer journey and ask whether it is delivering the outcome the organisation intended. That requires joining together marketing data, enquiries, bookings or sales, customer feedback, complaints and operational experience rather than treating them as unrelated measures. Marketing might report a successful campaign because it generated thousands of clicks.
But what happened next?
If customers arrived on a confusing webpage, couldn't complete the booking process or abandoned their purchase, the campaign hasn't delivered its full potential. Likewise, a customer service team might successfully close 95% of complaints. Useful information. But there's a better question: Why were customers having to complain in the first place? Measure the customer journey, not just the departments This is where data becomes particularly useful. Not more data for the sake of another dashboard. Useful data. Where are customers coming from? Where are they dropping out? How quickly are enquiries answered? Which marketing channels produce customers rather than simply traffic? What questions keep being asked? What complaints keep recurring? And what are frontline employees seeing that management reports aren't?
I've spent a significant part of my career connecting marketing activity with commercial and operational outcomes
The lesson I've taken from that experience is simple. Don't measure something just because it's easy to measure. Measure what helps you make a better decision. Sometimes a conversation with the person answering the telephone will tell a customer experience manager more than another 30-page analytics report. Ideally, you use both.
Customer complaints are business intelligence
Customer feedback becomes much more valuable when organisations stop treating it purely as something requiring a response. A complaint is data. A repeated question is data. An abandoned booking is data. A salesperson constantly having to explain something missing from the website is data. A member of staff developing their own workaround for a broken process is definitely data. Individually, these can look like minor operational problems. Collectively, they can expose a much bigger business issue. That's where customer experience management becomes strategic, rather than simply another name for customer service.
Start by becoming the customer
If I were reviewing a customer journey today, I wouldn't begin by redesigning the website, buying another CRM or commissioning a customer-experience strategy. I'd start by walking through the process as a customer. Then I'd ask the people actually delivering it what goes wrong. Where does the customer wait? Where do they have to repeat themselves? Where does somebody manually transfer information? Where are expectations unclear? Where does ownership disappear? What causes the same problem again and again? Some of the most valuable improvements I've seen don't begin with major transformation programmes. They begin when somebody joins the dots, takes ownership and fixes something everybody else has simply learned to work around.
Everybody should care
Somebody must own it. Customer experience absolutely should be everybody's responsibility. Marketing should think about it. Operations should think about it. Finance, digital, sales and customer service should think about it. But shared responsibility is not a substitute for accountability. That's ultimately where a good customer experience manager adds value: not by personally owning every customer interaction, but by ensuring somebody can see the complete journey, identify where it is breaking down and bring the right people together to improve it.
That applies whether you're running a growing business, managing a large organisation or delivering services to communities across Kent. Because your customer doesn't experience your organisational structure. They experience what happens next.
