I began my corporate career years ago at a brand that briefly became famous (infamous, for sure…so much so that I could probably name names without repercussion…they’ve long since learned the lesson anyway) for hiding the phone number for their Customer Service department.  Way back in those pre-Google days, it became almost a cultish rite of passage to find the number if you needed to reach them for help.

At the time, this was a scandal (again, they’ve recovered from that and of course, after thirty-odd years, have had plenty of other things to deal with and worry about CX-wise).  Everybody acknowledged how poor form it was to make yourself hard to reach and/or difficult to work with.  Their recovery from this was pretty dramatic and itself became a victorious tale of Customer centricity and learning from mistakes.

Funny thing about that story is that this was way before Customer Experience was even a thing.  Nobody for decades would call himself a Chief Customer Officer or staff an Office of the Customer.  No books had been written about it, and the term CX was still a long way off.  Seemingly, back in the day, it was just common-sense and obvious to everybody when a brand was falling short and treating their Customers poorly.  What’s more, finding and implementing the fix for that shortfall was likewise pretty straightforward.

Now look where we are these days with the hassle it is to interact with so many brands and the donotreply@ emails and general lack of concern for the Customer in industry after industry.  For allegedly being in an era of rabid Customer-centricity, where you can’t throw a rock out your window without hitting someone whose job is Customer Experience in some way or another, it’s not beyond the pale to say that we live, in some senses, in the least Customer-friendly business ecosystem ever.

It seems that, now that CX is ‘a thing’, we’ve become worse at it.  For that matter, for many brands, they’ve even gotten worse at even discerning what bad CX looks like.

I have a theory as to why:

There’s the old saying that when something (take your pick of what) becomes everybody’s job, suddenly it becomes nobody’s job.

Throughout my career, I’ve periodically been part of Project Management departments, Process Improvement departments, and of course, led Customer Experience departments.  Each of these organizations usually has, as part of its charter, the responsibility to engender enterprise-wide interest in and adherence to the principles of the topic at hand.  For example, as part of that BPI group, one of the things we did was try to drum up interest in Process Improvement throughout the entire company.  After all, we can help lead the charge, but we need an all-hands-on-deck effort in order to drive real improvement.  So, in a sense, we were trying to preach to the masses that, yes, improvement is also your job…and yours, and yours, and also yours!

Here’s the thing, though:  As I look back on any of those experiences (again, choose your topic), what we’d encounter in a lot of corners of the company was, frankly, relief:  Good, now that we’ve got y’all leading the way, we can get back to the work we do in our department, and leave all that to you.

So perhaps there’s a corollary to the “when it’s everybody’s job, it’s nobody’s job” principle:  When we stand-up an office for something, suddenly that’s where all that work goes and nobody outside of that office feels compelled to actually do any of it.  Suddenly, we lose all perspective on how we execute projects because, well, we’ve got a PMO that’ll oversee us.  Maybe we don’t need to improve any of our processes, because that’s what the BPI team does.  It may even be a sign of respect or deference…after all, let’s not step on their toes…they’re the experts, not us.

And so perhaps that’s how it is with CX, too?  When you stand up an “Office of the Customer” suddenly, oh, that’s the place where they worry about Customer Experience…so others don’t have to.

At that point, it may not occur to the AR department that the way they communicate with Customers who owe us money may not be the most polite or congenial, and is in fact turning them off our brand.  The Legal department will author Ts & Cs that quite effectively protect the company from any liability, but also confuse and vex the Customer, leading to attrition.  The Digital team will develop an elegant and slick online presence that’s completely inaccessible and unworkable to the average Customer who visits or otherwise leaves out simple features of the online shopping cart that anybody who objectively looks at it would notice, thus losing sales via that channel.

In these (and countless other) circumstances, not only do Customers take a back-seat to how organizations choose, on their own terms, to do business (because they never think to be Customer-centric as they put their systems together), but when the CX team does come around to bring it to their attention, their contemporaries are aggravated to see them and have them poking around in their sandbox…what are you doing here?  Shouldn’t you be off doing CX-things somewhere?

That brand I used to work for fixed a glaring instance of neglect not because it had the wisdom to put such matters in the hands of a dedicated CX department, but because back then, it was so obvious to everybody, regardless of where they worked or what their titles were, what a bad impression it was having on the Customers…it was a no-brainer to fix it.

Where has that sense gone these days?