The more I've thought about the question, the more my experience tells me its usually not the executive buy-in that's the stumbling block, it's most often the middle management that stymies the success of any initiative. How many times have we all seen a senior executive come back from a conference or retreat or read the conclusions of an outside consultant and decide its time for the organization to embrace change.
In the case of customer experience, almost every executive I've ever met (and I'm limiting my thoughts to the successful ones), fully embraces the tenets of customer experience, the correlation between loyalty and lifetime revenue and in many cases the relationship between customer experience, brand equity and market capitalization. You only need to look at Netflix to see prove the case.
No the problem generally is not that executive management doesn't get it and doesn't support the idea, the real problems are always around implementation. As they say, the devil is in the details. At the director, or mid-level, most marketers are charged with the performance of a set of specific activities, like campaigns or technology or vendor management for example and they are both given the resources and the KPIs to achieve and measure their goals. It is rarely the case however that those goals are really around being obsessed by customers and putting the customer experience at the center of what they do. Customer experience crosses all the organizational silos, from sales and marketing to customer service, operations and finance. Yet few middle managers who are the ones who actually drive the individual elements of the experience cross those same boundaries.
The answer? It is up to the executive sponsor of the initiaitve to not just champion the idea, but they must be committed to removing the organizational roadblocks that prevent the middle tier from bringing the initiative to life. Bureaucracies are the biggest challenge, but executives.
