VectorHX founder breaks down the CX governance basics
It’s always challenging when you’re running a business to know whether you have your priorities in order – or whether you are putting the proverbial cart before the horse. In Eric Karofksy’s line of work, there’s no question of what the cart and the horse represent.
Karofsky is the founder and CEO of Vector HX, a customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) agency based in Wellesley, Mass. He has found that, in the rush to become more customer-centric, organizations don’t always put controls and guardrails in place first.
“I find most companies are trying to improve customer experience, and then they back into governance,” Karofsky told 360 Magazine.
VectorHX
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, he added. The most important thing is to make CX a strategic priority. At some point, though, you also have to have a strategy for how CX will be carried out in a consistent, cohesive fashion, which is where governance comes in.
Karofsky shared more of his experience and advice in this area over a phone call. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How does your agency typically get involved in helping your clients establish or develop CX governance?
Usually there’s some sort of audit involved, but often it’s a result of the fact that there are little pockets across the organization that are doing things around the customer, but no one’s really looking at it overall. I had one client within a large government organization that specifically said they needed a CX governance plan – they knew what to ask for, they understood the benefits, but they really didn’t know how to do it. So it can be a case of specifically helping them create that plan or helping them fix other problems and we end up talking about governance.
Many organizations have established governance in other areas, like data governance. What makes CX governance unique?
At the highest level, they’re pretty similar. It’s about strategically aligning the work you’re doing. The difference is that CX governance is all-encompassing. It starts with understanding a vision of what CX is all about, and I often start by looking at the mission of the company and showing how customers are being served in many different ways by different departments. There are often walls between the different teams, and they’re invisible to customers but they wind up running into those walls, and that becomes a challenge. So CX governance is all about working with different departments and figuring out, how do they work together to solve for the customer and aligning on that. Sometimes the customer isn’t in the top one, two or three priorities on their list.
What does it take to build that alignment?
There’s always that risk of people saying, hey, it’s not my job. And you know, by having a governance structure in place and having a shared vision, there’s less likelihood that that will end up happening. It’s also about making sure that whatever we’re measuring is the thing that’s getting managed. We can end up defining, well, what are the goals that support that vision, and then what are the KPIs that support those goals? And then what are the signals that we can find to support and prove out those KPIs?
Right now a lot of organizations are starting to look at governance in terms of how they use artificial intelligence (AI). Is that a separate exercise or should it fall under CX governance?
Oh, I think it’s integral. You need to have some strategic oversight, and you need to have a plan on how you’re going to integrate AI. Building trust into AI is really important. Customers need to know they can trust it. But can they? And why can they? At what point is the AI potentially providing inaccurate information? What are the ethical guidelines and how do you manage risk? These are all elements that should be attached to the CX governance model.
If a company doesn’t have a distinct, customer experience team or chief customer officer, who do you find is kind of the natural role or team within the organization be the CX governance champion?
In that government organization I spoke about earlier there was no one in that CX role, and that became challenging for me, because I was being asked to develop CX governance, and I needed somebody to help push this out that I could partner with. One of the ways that I went about it is talking to a lot of different people, and I found out who was the most passionate about CX. That’s at all different levels, but inevitably you find some of the leaders who are more passionate about it than others. It might be easy to say it should be a part of marketing, and maybe it should be, or that it should be part of support. Again, it should be. There are certainly arguments for all kinds of champions, but I would rather find the person that is the most passionate about customer experience, because this is a long haul.
How can you make sure your CX governance efforts are on the right track?
You should always reevaluate whether you have the right KPIs in place. And sometimes it’s really hard because even if you do, it can be really hard to measure them or to measure them objectively. I think it becomes really important to find a way to tie it to ROI, because as much as we talk about the importance of CX, it’s interesting that CX jobs often get cut. That may be because t’s easier to cut in places that aren’t seen as tied to ROI.
