So, maybe CX is a branch of Marketing and the Marketing Director should be re-titled as Chief Customer Officer (as is happening in many companies) and the CCO should have specific shared responsibilities with peers for the tactical aspects of CX. This will force Director’s and CEO’s to actually communicate and work together to achieve a common goal – growth from loyal and profitable customers.

I’ve been “in marketing” for over 20 years and Customer Experience emerged as an extension of the marketing portfolio about 10 to 15 years ago. Most people who work in Customer Experience don’t like to think of themselves as marketers, which is fair enough when you consider the nature and practices of the marketing profession as a whole; however there is a very strong argument to say that Customer Experience is a strategic marketing discipline.

I will continue to only present myself as a Customer Experience professional; as it is much easier for people to understand; however it doesn’t mean that the majority of what I do hasn’t been fed by many years of marketing experience.

I think most marketing people operate at a tactical level and in a very specific field, so they don’t get complete coverage of the marketing mix. The majority do indeed only work with one or two of the 4Ps (and often not at all with the 3Ps), so it is understandable as to how the public at large has reached it’s view of marketing. I don’t think we need to rename what they do; however simply understand that what they do is just a small part of marketing as a whole.

I also lecture marketing for the CIM and EBS; and would have to disagree that the marketing curriculum would need to be beefed up. There is already a lot of information out there about the service mix (the 3Ps) and there are also specific courses that go into detail on Services Marketing (e.g. Heriot Watt), which have a very high cross-over with what you & I would understand to be Customer Experience.

Where I would agree, however, is that the service mix is largely misunderstood within the marketing community (e.g. people believing that the service mix only applies to the service sector) and there certainly needs to be a lot more emphasis on service theories within marketing.

The problem is that most people misunderstand the nature of marketing at it’s purest level (“The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably”).

I was a marketer who for the last six years of my life in corporate marketing was managing customer experience. When I set up on my own and told the world that I was a strategic marketer, most people couldn’t understand what it was that I did. However when I repositioned myself as a Customer Experience consultant, suddenly everyone got it. Customer Experience is a much better name for what I do; however isn’t significantly different from what I was doing in my last years as a corporate marketing professional.

Marketing is a very poor name for Marketing!

That would change when competition engaged in the market and consumers had other choices. And the only relevance to this comment is that the culture is driven from the top down. In the post office story, clearly whomever leads this outpost has either done a poor job of expressing the vision or the vision does not include the customer experience. It wasn’t so much the malingerers chatting while people wasted their valuable time as it was the culture that allowed it.

We see variables of that in the current “race to the bottom” following the recession in which customer contact work has been shipped to foreign places creating and inevitable cultural shock that renders effective communication improbable. It’s not even about the location that has driven consumers to voice outrage. Sure, there is social responsibility aspect to it, but in the end, it is the cultural barriers that result in a “waste of my time.”

The short message is this: Organizations who will succeed in this space of time will recognize the value of a customer’s time and find that respecting that by evolving your service around this factor will enhance market share….unless of course you own a monopoly and then you can chit chat like our postal friends did and thumb your nose at the sentiments of your customer base. However, that too will change because life seems to find a way.