The customer experience is rapidly becoming a top priority for many companies. Just last year, 68 percent of businesses planned to increase their customer management spend, and customer experience is expected to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020. As the way we do business evolves, so must the role of today’s CMO.

Why? Because CMOs own the corporate message and have valuable insight into customer behavior, challenges and pain points. They have a unique opportunity to not only act as expert customer experience advisors to senior leaders and other members of the C-suite, but also to influence organizational change, sales enablement, content marketing and brand integration to ensure a clear, compelling and consistent message is infused throughout all areas of the business — and every touchpoint of the customer experience.

Of course, this isn’t a one-time task. In order to truly take ownership of the immense role that marketing plays throughout the customer experience, CMOs need to be forward thinking. The following are four new or evolving roles that CMOs should fill to ensure a consistent and cohesive message is delivered at every customer touchpoint.

  1. Strategic customer experience influencer. Creating a meaningful, marketing-driven customer experience program begins by deploying a consistent message across all communication channels. CMOs should ensure that the message aligns with the business’s vision, mission and values and engages customers in a meaningful and relevant way.
  2. Organizational change agent. To truly deliver a clear, consistent and compelling message throughout the customer experience, it must be woven throughout the company’s DNA. CMOs should partner with senior leadership in HR to create a messaging-driven organizational change program for employees that infuses the corporate message, as well as the company’s vision, mission and values, into the hearts and minds of employees at every level.
  3. Thought leader. While the marketing team focuses on day-to-day messaging and communication tasks, CMOs must look ahead to strategically establish the company as a thought leader in the minds of customers. Pulling the message forward in an intentional and strategic manner in content marketing, social storytelling, face-to-face marketing and beyond helps shape the way target audiences think about their challenges and how they may solve them.
  4. Sales enablement strategist. While prospective customers may progress as much as 60 percent of the way through the buying process before engaging with a company representative, that still leaves nearly half of the experience in the hands of a sales person. Now more than ever, it is vital that marketing strategically partners with sales to ensure the messages delivered in the sales phase align with the messaging prospects consumed in the self-service phase of their journey.

Today’s CMOs must go beyond historically defined boundaries and partner with all areas of the organization to ensure customers consume a clear, compelling and consistent message at every stage of the customer experience. That means CMOs must take on new roles that allow them to shape programs that shift the corporate culture from capabilities-centric to customer-centric and influence how employees at every level in the organization communicate the corporate story.

Download this quick read to understand the evolving role of today’s CMO.