Future Proofing Your Business with CXO

How your company is organized can create a resilient infrastructure that primes your organization to be ready for inevitable disruption. Our solution is elevating the concept of experience to the c-suite through the addition of the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) role and our savvy strategist Gina Bleedorn is leading the charge as Adrenaline’s new CXO

In Is The Internet of Things Dead?, we expanded on the concept of The Experience of Things, highlighting the reality that disruption doesn’t always come from new technologies and innovations, but rather, from consumer expectation springing from numerous directions. Central to the concept of disruption is the understanding that you can’t really plan for it. Disruption by its very nature is unpredictable and unknowable. While you may not be able to identify what a second or third-wave of disruption looks like for your company, you can create an environment of resilience. A place where disruption does not make or break your business, but rather, allows you to absorb the shock of disruption and course-correct along the way.

For us and other forward-thinking organizations, the CXO role is the head of that flexible ecosystem. For years we heard about User Experience (UX), which focused squarely on products and services and the experience a user has from that interaction. Next came Customer Experience (CX), which broadened the concept of experience to incorporate more brand interactions across more channels. Here, the focus was no longer concentrated on the product, but on the person interacting with the product. Brand Experience (BX) takes the concept of interaction one step further and focuses on all the ways consumers interact with your brand and, importantly, how your brand interacts back. This holistic concept of experiences is actually at the root of the CXO role and the experience ecosystem.

Featured in the article To Be or Not to Be The Customer Experience Officer, author Barb Mosher Zinck points to Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO of Hubspot, who outlines several categories of experiences that the CXO role facilitates:

• The Product Experience
• The Purchase Experience
• The Brand Experience
• The Support Experience
• The Exit Experience
• The Employee Experience

Zinck says, “These experiences together encompass the entire customer experience. And while in some organizations it may make sense that the CEO is the CXO, I suspect that for most, it’s also a role that needs to stand alongside the CEO, the CMO, the CIO, etc., because this person needs total focus on ensuring that the organization not only talks about customer experience, but actually lives it.”

It’s the ecosystem that is your brand in every way – within the market, internally, in every touchpoint that people experience you. According to Gina, “I see the CXO role as simultaneously looking inside and outside your company to see what is shaping your reputation in the marketplace. It’s how you interface with customers, with potential new customers, with competitors, with employees, with really everybody – across all channels of experience. It’s how everyone judges you based on everything you do, essentially shaping your reputation in the market at large. This is an inherently strategic approach that understands and calibrates these interactions, then knits them together into a larger whole.”

Gina’s CXO role will not only involve employing her strategist’s eye to Adrenaline’s clients, but will also continue to harness that same strategic approach for Adrenaline as a company. Want to meet this dynamo in person? You can see Gina at this week’s Independent Community Bankers of America Conference in San Antonio, presenting on the Universal Banker Experience.