Where should Customer Experience (CX) reside in your organization?
The answer is: it depends....
Ideally, if the CEO or President of your agency is passionate about CX and wants a broad, comprehensive program, CX should reside in the Office of the CEO. That will maximize the impact of the CX program and alignment with the CEO's vision. Positioning CX in the Office of the CEO gives the program stature and places it in a location that spans all parts of the organization. It also positions CX to participate in key meetings with the CEO regarding all aspects of service and provides an opportunity to have a customer advocate at the table when discussing plans, budgets, and performance measures with each service delivery unit.
Alternatively, if there is a CX champion in a particular part of the organization, placing a CX program there may produce good outcomes. For example, if your Chief Operating Officer is a CX champion, CX could reside in the COO office, or if the Manager of Facilities Maintenance is a CX champion, CX could reside there. Similarly, CX could be co-located with other customer-facing functions like Fare Payment, Security, Communications, Customer Service, or Construction. The downside of embedding the CX unit in any of these functional divisions, though, is that it tends to narrow the focus of CX. Ideally customers tell us where CX improvements are needed and the CX unit scope is broad enough to cover any and all customer priorities.
The third option is a distributed model, with a central CX function in the Office of the CEO and satellite CX champions located within each customer-facing function. With this hybrid model, the central CX unit can form a standing committee with all the CX champions to collaborate and align efforts.
While CX is best positioned in the Office of the CEO, ultimately CX is everyone's job. One central CX Plan or CX team cannot anticipate and solve all pain points your customers experience on a daily basis. CX requires having a critical mass of employees spread throughout the organization, trained in customer-centric thinking and empowered to fix pain points expeditiously.