The Customer Experience Marketing Leader’s First 100 Days

Customer experience as a concept covers a lot of ground within organizations, from the product or service itself, to factors like billing or tech support that can influence a customer’s overall view of the brand. Understanding this wide scope while focusing resources on high impact activities must be the primary focus for a CX leader in the first months of their tenure.

“For new marketing leaders focused on CX, creating early wins requires a bold approach to set expectations, audit assets and build bridges with key stakeholders,” says  Augie Ray,  Research Director, Gartner for Marketers. Marketers entering a new CX role face many challenges, including ill-defined roles, lofty expectations and the absence of an internal network needed to spark cross-channel collaboration.

Organize your first 100 days into six phases: Prepare, assess, plan, act, measure and communicate. Because customer experience may be new to the marketing department (or the broader organization), the work begins before day one.

Before your first day, research the company’s marketing and CX functions throughout the organization. Meet with your boss to discuss expectations and negotiate some short- (three- and six-month) and longer-term (one-year) goals. Work with your boss to identify key stakeholders who influence and support CX. Your understanding and recognition of existing people and processes is vital to remove confusion and misalignment between teams. Meet your team and peers to gather information about CX efforts and challenges.

Assess immediate needs for CX and audit existing resources. Begin building your network and propose CX key performance indicators (KPIs). Because collaboration and communication are so important, report stakeholder engagement progress to your boss and discuss next steps. The CX mandate spans the end-to-end customer journey, so take time to understand the budgeting and approval process throughout the entire organization.

Leave the assess phase ready to shift from information gathering to planning. Create an action plan and proposal outlining how you will address any gaps in systems, data, people and processes in the CX program. Influence the direction of existing projects because it’s critical that projects you inherit support your goals and plan. Use, develop or refine segments and personas that begin to identify key customers based on their needs and expectations. 

Deliver immediate benefit by successfully, and quickly, concluding any inherited projects. During the act phase, launch a collaborative journey mapping exercise and secure a cross-functional team to begin the process of mapping the entire customer journey for one or more key personas. Remember to socialize initial personas, because they can drive awareness and focus for a variety of marketing efforts.

One key goal of the measure phase is to produce and promote early, tactical and visible wins. Analyze data to correlate CX measures with business outcomes to help validate the value of improving the experience. During the measure phase you’ll also want to initiate routine data and reporting processes to regularly collect and report on outcomes. Develop reports, distribution lists and dashboards to activate communication efforts.

Throughout your first 100 days, communication and collaboration are key. Build your network and start to share your vision. “Meet with key stakeholders throughout the organization, and offer your perspective for how the marketing department can support and facilitate CX improvements that deliver better business and marketing goals,” says Ray.

This article has been updated from the original, published on December 6, 2016, to reflect new events, conditions or research.