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Customer experience (CX) is often “placed somewhere” in organizational structures – under marketing, customer service, or product. In reality, however, it does not arise in any of these departments. It arises between them. And it is precisely in this in-between space that one of the most fundamental structural problems of contemporary companies takes place: customer journeys are horizontal, while responsibility remains vertical.
The result is predictable. Fragmentation. Everyone optimizes their part. No one manages the whole.
The customer does not see departments. The company does.
The organizational model of most companies has not fundamentally changed over the past 50 years. It is still built on functional silos: marketing, sales, operations, IT, customer service. Each unit has its own KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), budgets, and reporting.
The customer, however, does not know this structure – nor do they care. They perceive only one continuous experience: from the first contact to problem resolution. As soon as friction arises between departments, the customer immediately feels it.
Typical symptoms are well known and repeatedly confirmed by research:
- inconsistent information across channels (e.g. different prices or conditions),
- shifting responsibility between teams,
- optimization of local KPIs at the expense of the overall experience,
- absence of an owner of key “moments of truth”.
For example, a McKinsey study shows that organizations that actively manage end-to-end customer journeys can increase customer satisfaction by up to 20%, reduce service costs by 15%, and at the same time increase revenues by 10–15% (McKinsey & Company, From touchpoints to journeys, 2016). Yet most companies still measure and manage performance in isolation at the level of individual channels or departments.
Journey ownership: a role that is missing – or not working
The concept of “journey ownership” (ownership of the customer journey) has appeared more frequently in recent years. It is often misunderstood.
It is not another layer of governance nor some kind of “CX police”. It is a clearly defined responsibility for the performance of a specific customer journey across functions.
A true journey owner:
- is responsible for end-to-end performance (not just for a part),
- works with a combination of operational data and customer feedback,
- connects CX metrics with business outcomes,
- initiates changes in processes, technologies, and organizational capabilities.
The key is that this person often does not have direct line authority over all the involved teams. Nevertheless, they must have a strong mandate from leadership and clearly defined objectives.
It is precisely the absence of this mandate that is one of the main reasons why up to 70% of CX transformation initiatives fail or do not achieve the expected impact (Boston Consulting Group, Fixing the Flaws in Customer Experience Transformations, 2019).
Three models of responsibility – and their limits
In practice, we encounter three basic models of how companies manage CX.
Centralized CX team
A specialized team maps customer journeys, measures experience, and proposes improvements.
The advantage is methodological consistency. The limitation is execution power. Without direct influence on operations, recommendations often remain unimplemented.
Distributed responsibility
Each department is responsible for its part of the journey.
This model reflects the reality of company management, but systematically fails in managing the whole. The end-to-end perspective is missing.
Hybrid model with journey owners
Key journeys (e.g. onboarding, complaint handling, retention) have their owners across functions.
This model proves to be the most effective in practice – if it is supported by leadership. For example, Forrester has long emphasized that organizations with clearly defined journey ownership achieve higher customer loyalty and faster growth (Forrester, Drive Customer Obsession With Journey-Centricity, 2020).
Without data, responsibility cannot be managed
One of the biggest weak points is working with data.
Many organizations still operate with aggregated metrics such as NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) at the level of the whole company. However, these indicators do not say where exactly the problem arises.
Effective journey ownership requires:
- metrics defined at the level of specific journeys,
- linking operational data (e.g. processing time, number of contacts) with customer feedback,
- regular evaluation of performance at the journey level.
Without this granularity, it is not possible to identify key “moments of truth,” let alone make someone responsible for them.
Technological platforms (e.g. tools for journey analytics) can make this data layer accessible – but on their own they do not solve the structural problem. That problem is organizational, not technological.
The role of leadership: a decisive factor
Journey ownership is not an operational improvement. It is a strategic decision.
If:
- incentives remain tied purely to functional KPIs,
- leadership does not actively resolve conflicts between departments,
- CX is not linked to financial results,
then journey ownership becomes a formal role without real influence.
Gartner, in its study, states that only 25% of organizations are able to effectively link CX metrics with business results (Gartner, Customer Experience Management Survey, 2022). Without this connection, CX remains perceived as a “soft” discipline – and its priority corresponds to that.
So who owns the customer experience?
The question “Who owns customer experience?” is essentially wrongly framed.
No single function can own it.
The correct question is:
Who is responsible for specific customer journeys – and has the data, the mandate, and the support of leadership to do so?
Without clearly defined journey ownership, customer experience remains trapped between the silos of the organization. And the customer continues to bear the costs of internal boundaries they should never have to feel.
