The customer experience will suffer when no one clearly owns it. Teams work on initiatives in isolation, insights and research sit scattered across different systems and there's no regular rhythm of reviewing performance or making decisions together.

We often see teams and their priorities becoming misaligned. Different teams make decisions without seeing the full picture, research is not done when its most needed or valuable research gets done but isn't accessible to everyone and there's no shared accountability for whether customer experience is improving or declining.

This is why we have included Governance as a category in our CX Scorecard.

It's not about creating bureaucracy or more meetings. It should create value, ensuring someone clearly owns customer outcomes, teams can access the insights and research they need and creating regular rhythms of reviewing performance and making coordinated decisions.

The real problem this solves

When customer experience governance isn't clear, accountability diffuses. When everyone owns customer experience, no one owns it. Teams work on improvements without coordinating, initiatives overlap or contradict each other and when performance declines, there's no clear person responsible for addressing it. Customer experience becomes a shared concern that nobody has accountability to solve.

Knowledge stays trapped in silos. Research is conducted, journey maps are created and insights get generated, but they sit in individual team folders or people's heads. When someone needs to make a decision, they can't find the research that was already done or access the outcomes of previous projects. Work gets repeated and decisions get made without the benefit of existing knowledge.

And there's no regular rhythm of review and improvement. Without structured reviews of customer experience performance, problems drift without being addressed. Teams don't come together to look at what's working and what isn't, to share learnings across different areas or to make coordinated decisions about priorities. Customer experience improvement becomes reactive rather than systematic.

What strong capability looks like

Someone clearly owns customer experience outcomes. There's a named person or team accountable for whether customer experience is improving. They have authority to coordinate work across departments, make decisions about priorities and direct resources. When performance needs to improve, everyone knows who's responsible for driving that improvement.

Research and insights are centrally accessible. Journey maps, customer research, performance data and insights live in a well organised repository that people across the organisation can access. When someone needs to make a decision, they can find relevant research quickly rather than starting from scratch or making assumptions.

There's a regular rhythm of performance review. Leadership regularly reviews customer experience performance using both operational data and customer insights. These reviews surface emerging issues, validate whether improvements are working and create shared accountability for outcomes.

Guidelines enable consistent, responsible decisions. Documented guidelines help teams make consistent decisions, particularly where new technology like AI is being used. These aren't rigid rules but frameworks that ensure customer experience considerations are built into how work gets done.

What we're measuring

We're identifying whether the basics are in place for teams to coordinate, access knowledge and make decisions together rather than in isolation.

Organisations that establish clear governance are the ones that can sustain improvements over time and achieve better outcomes through coordinated effort.

If you're responsible for the customer experience but can't point to who owns it, or teams can't find the data and insights they need when making decisions or there's no regular rhythm of reviewing performance together, that's the gap this capability fills.

Get your CX Scorecard to see exactly where your capability sits and receive personalised recommendations on where to improve.

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