Growth and Development of Customer Experience

For those of you across the Customer Contact industry who are still unsure about the meaning of Customer Experience:

‘A customer experience is an interaction between an organization and a customer as perceived through a customer’s conscious and subconscious mind. It is a blend of an organization’s rational performance, the senses stimulated and the emotions evoked and intuitively measured against customer expectations across all moments of contact.’ Taken from Beyond Philosophy – What is Customer Experience?’

Customer Experience has become a common and sometimes, over-used phrase in the past few years, yet there are still some organisations finding difficulty in developing a clear and common definition of CEX for them, despite the majority of business owners and leaders accepting that improvements in customer management will help drive profitable growth.

According to  the ‘2015 Digital Trends Briefing’ published by Econsultancy and Adobe, 78 percent of companies will try to differentiate through customer experience in 2015.

Here at DJHQ, we have seen significant uplifts in the amount of positions being hired, advertised and or, created with the title including Customer Experience.

There are always exceptions but looking at the CX roles in general, they tend to fall within three categories:

1. A re-write of an existing role to include an emphasis on Customer Experience.
2. A new role that embodies Customer Analytics, Customer Insight, Process Improvement and Business Change. This has varying reporting lines, and may sit within Marketing, Operations and or, Customer Service.
3. A newly created role, or, a position to replace a previous Director of Customer Service, or Head of Customer Contact with additional, or increased responsibilities which includes a complete view of the entire business operations, departments and functions, with the strategic mandate to identify and effect customer change across all channels and touch-points.

There has also been a distinct rise in salary ranges for the senior level; ‘Head Of’ and Director positions within CX.  In part, some of this has been due to the creation of new, senior appointments across Customer Experience but also because some of the more traditional titles such as Customer Service Director, or Head of Customer Service have been re branded to a CX or CEX title.  This has led to more positions at this level being logged than in previous years.

From data provided by the Customer Experience assignments Douglas Jackson have been helping their customers hire and candidate salary information captured, we have produced the following salary insight for Customer Experience across the UK.

Customer Experience Director titles – minimum & maximum basic salaries registered (rounded up to nearest £,000)

‘Head of’ Customer Experience – minimum & maximum basic salaries registered (rounded up to nearest £,000)

One thing is certain, effective Customer Experience will help realise a competitive differentiator and with a large % of organisations looking to embrace this, we will continue to see further growth and development of Customer Experience and across more channels, as the multi-channel and omni-channel environment continues to evolve.

In today’s market, where your customer, won’t hesitate to walk away from your brand and an already established relationship if you do not meet their needs, if you have not already started to develop your customer experience strategy, then now is the time.

If you are looking for to hire across Customer Experience, or already work within CEX and are considering a new challenge, please give us a call and see how we can help. Tel: 0845 620 9720 , or email: mail@douglas-jackson.com

What do you think about the growth and development of Customer Experience? We are always interested in your thoughts so please do comments here.