EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
When a company starts its customer experience (CX) journey, it often establishes a centralized team to build the necessary internal capabilities and catalyze change. However, that team’s effectiveness can be limited by a number of things, including divided attention within lines of business and a lack of resources to reach across the company. In its 2012 report, The Future of Customer Experience, Temkin Group identified the need for CX efforts to become more federated. To succeed in the long-run, companies need to focus more on embedding CX capabilities across departments and functions through a federated CX model. A federated model is a structure for enabling and coordinating a distributed set of customer experience capabilities, and it operates through centers of excellence—which spread specialized expertise beyond the boundaries of the centralized team—and enterprise CX coordination—which ensures that company-wide goals and standards are in place—and distributed CX skills and mindsets—which infuses customer-centric mindset throughout the company. These centers of excellence include deep analytics, reporting and data visualization, experience design, customer-driven process improvement, and culture change management. Enterprise CX coordination oversees enterprise CX strategy and governance, insights, metrics and reporting, standard methodologies and tools, central CX storylines, and portfolio management. And distributed CX skills and mindsets encompasses CX goal alignment, customer understanding, empathy orientation, improvement focus, and organizational awareness. The path companies take to federation can include multiple phases, such as centrally driven, cross-functional participation, distributed expertise, and federated. As their companies move down this path, successful CX professionals will be the ones who learn the business, coach and advise others, embrace empowerment, and keep learning; or, alternatively, they can choose to specialize and leave the central CX team to join one of the centers of excellence.
This report was originally published by Temkin Group prior to its acquisition by Qualtrics in October 2018. It has been reformatted, but no substantive changes have been made to the content.
