Building a rewarding customer experience is more than a "play it by ear" project. It's a systematic journey to determine what works best for your audience and to anticipate their needs and desires. As it result, it demands governance.

Customer experience gover­nance is best defined as the methodology employed to guide delivery of a business's customer experience strategy. Effective governance requires an organization to provide a consistent structure and decision-making process for their customer experiences across all channels.

West Monroe Partners recently conducted a survey on the impact customer effort has on banks' customer experience and found that cross-channel this type of governance is a key differentiator between the high customer effort banks and those providing an effortless experience. Banks with well-defined roles, clear goals, and strong executive sponsorship were noticeably more capable in delivering on their customer experience strategy.