Keith Pearce is VP of Marketing for Service Cloud at Salesforce. An industry veteran who got his start close to 20 years ago at Siemens, he’s a firm believer in the transformative value of great customer service — both to companies and to their customers. We caught up with Keith to get his thoughts on how companies can thrive in the Age of the Customer by delivering superior customer journeys.

According to a recent study about customer experience, companies experience a $3 ROI for every $1 spent on customer experience. Do you think most companies understand the true value of investing in CX?

KP: Not yet, and part of the problem is that customer experience is really a catch-all phrase for everything a company does that reaches a customer. That can be a company’s website, how a product is packaged, how the customer interacts with a service technician, or even how a product is displayed in a retail store. It’s really a massive array of touchpoints that span across all departments that contribute to the “customer experience,” which is why an awesome customer experience can seem so tricky to manage.

That’s why many companies are now appointing Chief Experience Officers. The CXO role is being implemented to unite all of the touchpoints a company has with a customer to create an end-to-end experience that exceeds the customer’s expectations. In its infancy, the CXO was really a service-oriented role, but more recently it has evolved to have marketing executives taking on these sorts of positions — the reason being that savvy marketers understand that the customer experience really defines the entire brand.

As more companies start to catch up and deliver superior customer experiences, what’s the next competitive advantage in the service landscape?

KP: The next step is really evolving from the customer experience to managing the entire customer journey. The idea of a customer journey really originated with airlines thinking about the customer’s journey from the curb at the airport to stepping onto the airplane and settling into their seat. Smart airlines started to realize that there were huge advantages in managing every step of that journey to make it more efficient.

Now, as the customer journey has become a concept that reaches beyond airlines, the service department plays an absolutely critical role in making the customer journey a reality. Think about it — no other interactions have as direct an impact on the customer experience quite like service.

Now, customer service departments are organizing themselves based on journeys. Rather than each individual in your service department being a jack of all trades who can answer questions about anything and everything, you have specific roles aligned to journey steps that might specialize in onboarding, billing, technical support or customer retention. I really think this is the future of how we think about and structure the customer service department.

What’s a good first step for companies that are struggling to start building an awesome customer experience?

KP: Customer service. Think about it: Customers probably won’t leave your company because they didn’t like an advertisement, or because of a frustrating experience with your website. They are much more likely to leave because of poor customer service. Starting with the service department is a crucial first step. By isolating the eight or ten  reasons why customers interact with your customer service department, you can focus on managing the customer journeys around these specific issues.

For example, you know that when you have a new customer, there’s a whole host of potential questions they might have around getting started.  And you want those first moments to be managed exceptionally. Or if they’ve recently received a bill, you want to be able to handle those interactions with people empowered to solve the issue in that interaction instead of requiring a manager or supervisor. You can start small and isolate these common customer interactions, and then build out the experiences from there.

In your role as VP of Marketing for Service Cloud, you’re in close communication with our customers every day. What are you hearing from them?

KP: No matter the company size, whether they come from the private or public sector, or different industries, every organization is thinking about customer experience and struggling with how to make it a reality, how to manage it. What I find really interesting is that small, scrappy startups are really leading the way in driving this innovation forward because they aren’t tied down to any legacy systems. It’s hard to innovate upon a 20- or 30-year legacy of processes and systems. Startups can think about the customer experience and customer journey management, first moment interactions -- right from the very beginning. What’s great about Salesforce and Service Cloud is that we’re giving companies of any size the platform they need to innovate at the speed of their customers — that’s what the Lightning experience is all about.