Journeys and CXO / CDO

I finally found what I thought makes the most sense via McK promo material.

McK via HBR

“Overseeing all of a firm’s interactions with customers is someone in the role of chief experience officer CXO, a relatively new position in the C-suite. Chief digital officers are also starting to have this top-level responsibility. Typically reporting to this executive is a journey-focused strategist who helps guide decisions on which journey investments and customer segments to focus on; he or she prioritizes current journeys for digital development and spots opportunities for new ones.”

To build successful journeys, these managers rely on “scrum teams” of specialists from across IT, analytics, operations, marketing, and other functions. The teams are execution-oriented, fast, and agile, constantly testing and iterating improvements. Collectively, the team members work to understand customers’ wants and needs at each step of the journey and make taking the next step worthwhile. They ask questions such as “What types of functionality, look and feel, and message will propel customers to the next step?” and “How does the timing of prompts affect customers’ responses?” Pursuing answers to questions like these, teams enter into rounds of development, piloting iterative digital-journey prototypes, analyzing operational and customer-use data, and then measuring the impact on customer behavior produced by each tweak to the journey.HBR “Sitting at the center of the action for a given journey is new type of leader, the “journey product manager.” People in this role (more commonly called “solution managers,” “experience managers,” or “segment managers”) are the journey’s economic and creative stewards. They have ultimate accountability for its business performance, managing it as they would any product. And like other product managers, they are judged according to how well they meet an array of product-specific measures, including journey ROI (see the sidebar “Holding Journey Managers Accountable”).

Guided by the firm’s business priorities (for example, growing market share, increasing revenue, and improving customer satisfaction), they explore ways to expand and optimize the journeys they’re responsible for, increase their stickiness, engage new partners, fend off competitors, and cut costs, particularly through digitizing manual processes. More operationally, it’s their job to understand how customers move through the journey, to spot unusual customer behaviors (such as detouring or abandonment at a critical touchpoint), and to discern what attracts new customers—or dissuades them from engaging.