Tom DeWitt is the Founder of the XMGlobal Collaborative and co-author of the book “The Customer Excellence Enterprise”.
The top priority for CMOs this year, according to Forrester Research, is improving the customer experience. That’s right: they now care more about CX quality than brand awareness. Last year CX never even made the cut.
So why has CX suddenly jumped to the top of the list?
The answer lies in what CMOs named as their other top priorities: advancing AI capabilities; measuring marketing effectiveness; updating the loyalty platform; and optimizing marketing personalization. All of these are interconnected and explain why quality CX has become such a pressing concern.
CMOs have read the alarming headlines just like everyone else: a “massive AI breakthrough” is expected this year, according to Morgan Stanley. Businesses are being told to “brace for progress that will shock them”. For marketers that means one thing: gut wrenching job dislocation as AI-driven automation sweeps across every business. Marketing as a discipline is especially vulnerable. According to Anthropic, 65% of the work performed by marketers is eventually going to be taken over by AI for a fraction of the cost. CFOs can be expected to exert greater pressure than ever before to shrink marketing’s headcount. Even product managers will be at risk of being replaced.
That’s why causal marketing measurement has become so important. Because the only way for marketers to push back against the budget cutting zeal of CFOs is to prove, once and for all, that the funds allocated to them are being spent wisely. Marketing has to show that its programs actually drive revenue and sales.
Which is why loyalty is also a big priority. In an age of agentic commerce, when people can use AI tools to do their shopping for them, traditional brand building loses its purpose. Marketers will have to conceive of entirely new ways to fuel growth other than to broadcast messages to large audiences. Even hyper-personalization of messaging won’t be enough to secure the attention and loyalty of customers. Because there is only one way to earn brand loyalty: become an indispensable part of people’s lives. A brand they can’t live without.
As AI levels the playing field, making it possible for even the smallest company to compete against the largest incumbent brands, customer experience will become the main differentiator. And that is why CX is now the top priority of CMOs: they’ve finally come round to the idea that they need to fully own and shape the experience in order to build deeper loyalty and create brand differentiation in the Age of AI. But for marketers to succeed, according to CXM expert Tom DeWitt, they must first convince corporate management that improving the customer experience should not only be a marketing obsession but a strategic imperative for the entire enterprise.
DeWitt believes that “helpfulness” needs to become the core doctrine of a new operating model dedicated to making the everyday lives of customers better. And that goes far beyond fixing what’s broken. It demands the creation of exceptional experiences at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Organizations must embed customer excellence into their DNA – make it their mission to help customers live better lives.
Marketing has a central role to play. It must paint a vivid picture of what an ideal experience looks like from the customer’s perspective. And then it must reimagine how the organization creates value and builds trust amongst customers. The CMO’s job then becomes irreplaceable: a steward of trust, in charge of making customers feel good.
In his book “The Customer Excellence Enterprise”, Tom DeWitt and his co-author Wayne Simmons lay out a detailed playbook for how companies can adopt “helpfulness” as an operating principle with the goal of winning “customers for life”. Tom is the founder and Executive Director of the XMGlobal Collaborative dedicated to the field of customer experience management. He’s best known for shaping CX as a formal business discipline, having developed the first-ever Master’s Degree Program in CXM while teaching at Michigan State University.
I started by asking Tom what led him to start the XMGlobal Collaborative.
Tom DeWitt: It was really to be able to reach anyone globally that wanted to make a change. You know, as you may know, I founded the Master’s Degree in customer experience at Michigan State University. And it was designed really to address a need in the industry that was twofold.
One was, in general, a lack of a comprehensive skill set at the leadership level to effectively manage the experience management function. You know, unlike marketing and finance and accounting that have established academic programs and disciplines, leadership roles are often filled by people who came from very divergent paths through sales, through market research, contact center operations. And I think with that comes a certain mentality about what CX is and what are the necessary KPIs and operational factors. But as you well know, you know, experience management is a very multidisciplinary profession. You know, it involves skills to be effective in the C-suite, organizational behaviour, organizational change, employee experience, design, research, both quantitative and qualitative. So wide range there.
The second factor was, you know, despite saying that you lead the CX function, what you often find is many organizations, that’s just the contact center or it’s just surveys, you know? Which, it’s not about the ethos of the organization and why they’re there. You know, I’ve always been a big proponent that businesses should be the fundamental reason businesses are there, are to serve the needs of mankind and humans and help. And that profitability is what allows you to stay in business. Now, that’s very different than what most businesses feel. You know, we’re in business to make profit and grow stakeholder value and la la la la la.
So the master’s degree was really designed to address that, that there’s this huge gap. But what I realized at Michigan State is there’s a finite group of people we can reach with the degree program both because of money, because a master’s degree requires a significant amount of money for, for most people, particularly people in developing countries. You know, we had students from Vietnam and South Africa and, um, the tuition fees, which were over $30,000, which, you know, in the US that’s a cost of a car and that’s not that big of a, but for someone in South Africa or Vietnam, that was very significant.
So I was cognizant of the fact that no matter what I attempted to do at Michigan State, in fact I even tried to create separate cohorts in different parts of the world, we wouldn’t be able to reach everyone. So the goal with the XM Global Collaborative. First of all, let’s drop the C because experience management, it should be, you know, it involves a multidisciplinary approach. We need people who are experts in employee experience and engagement. We need people who are experts in user experience, design, and delivery. We need people who are experts in customer success.
So it requires, and what I had seen from all the associations out there is despite saying, you know, what we aspire to is an integration across the firm, across functions, towards a common focus on understanding and meeting the needs of the customer. And you can’t do that if you don’t acknowledge those other disciplines and make sure you include them. So that’s why we’re the XM Global, again Global is the other piece, you know, I learned by putting the curriculum together at Michigan State University that featured all instructors from the US and case studies from the US that as a profession globally we tend to operate in our own geographic silos. Whether it’s in South America where they, you know, frankly they have a very vibrant industry, both Spanish speaking countries as well as in Brazil and the same can be said for Europe and pockets in Asia and so forth.
As a world traveller, so now I’ve lived in six different countries in my life, seven if you include Hawaii, which is a total different entity than the mainland US and I’ve travelled over 45 countries. What I see, you know, when I travel, I love to travel as a consumer and as a scientist, as a consumer scientist, where I see, you know, I notice these differences and how customer needs are being met. Whether it’s a towel, a steam generated towel warmer in London next to the bathtub, which I love by the way. Or whether it’s, I’m trying to think of some examples in Thailand, the banking industry where teller counters are noticeably absent. When you go to a bank branch, you sit across from the banker, you know, in a more personal relationship and the waiting areas can be luxurious, beautiful. Some, some, you know, Bangkok Bank and where people are fiercely loyal to their bank. When you go to the shopping mall, there are four or five branches of different banks next to each other and to go country to country and see that.
So we wanted people to have the opportunity, both individually and as groups to be able to engage across cultures, to be able to engage across borders and sharing best practices and learning from one another in a very collaborative environment. Most learning opportunities in our industry come from webinars and panel discussions where people are being talked at. And we, you know, we believe people can learn more from each other than they can from those quote, unquote experts. So, you know, we focus on learning opportunities that are applied and collaborate, whether it’s online or in person. (12.09)
Stephen Shaw: And I want to ask you how things have gone so far, but I, it strikes me as interesting, because I really hadn’t made that connection before, that a country’s culture can have an impact on their attitude…
TD: Oh, it’s incredible.
SS: …towards CX. Yeah.