Superior Customer experience : "Organization instinct or Process"?

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Robert G. Howard  has this interesting post on how Companies seeking to become more customer-centric should define the customer experience as a formal end-to-end process in their organization.

He makes a compelling point : "For those organizations that have formally adopted a process-centric approach to business, the process is often formally defined, measured, monitored, and continually optimized. This level of discipline is critical to deliver a process that is high performing, predictable, efficient, effective, and error-free. In order to become more customer-centric, businesses should add the customer experience end-to-end process to their portfolio of strategically important processes. The customer experience is a process. Like any process, the customer experience process can work perfectly (or go horribly wrong), may contain numerous scenarios, and it can be analyzed, re-engineered and optimized.
Great customer experiences don't happen by accident. They require a keen attention to detail, a focus on every touch point, and an orchestration of all customer encounters regardless of how each customer may navigate the company. Mastering the customer experience must begin with mastering the end-to-end customer experience process."

Read more about what Robert has to say at:

http://www.clearbrick.com/blog/labels/customer%20experience.html

My take is as follows:

• In many organizations no particular function is mandated with driving a "customer centric" agenda.
• Often Marketing picks up the gauntlet !But the reality in many Services organizations(banks, hotels, telecom companies) is that Marketing often does not have the clout to push through organizational changes which impact customer facing processes.
• However in growth markets such as India the opportunity to embed "customer centric" processes into the fabric of the organization is very strong . This is because entire industries are being created right from "scratch"-Retail, telecom and many others. It needs a strong CEO who drives the customer centricity agenda himself and makes it practical for the market to absorb. The CEO then must drive a technology agenda ,with the CTO, which puts together the "plumbing" for crafting a great customer experience.