DIGITAL STRATEGY & CONSULTING
SHARE
Digital experience now shapes what it costs to serve customers and how many of them stay, which puts it on the agenda of product, service and operations as well as marketing. This piece looks at how to share responsibility for it in a way that works.
For about twenty years, marketing has designed the digital experience while product, service and operations have lived with it and paid for most of it. The distance between where the experience is designed and where it's paid for has grown for years, and it explains much of why experiences fail.
Two questions expose the problem:
Whose budget takes the hit when the experience fails?
Were those people in the room when it was designed?
In most organizations, the teams whose budgets take the hit were not in the room.
The teams covering these costs have good reason to want a say, so senior leaders now need to decide what a new arrangement should look like and how to make it work.
Marketing got the experience because it had the channels. When "digital experience" meant the website and the campaign, handing it to the team that ran the website made sense.
Today the experience also includes the portal, the invoice, the support queue, the renewal and the product itself, yet ownership of how it's designed still sits with the team that runs the website.
Portals, service, fulfillment and product have shaped the experience for years. What's changed is that organizations can't keep absorbing the cost of this arrangement. AI and automation now make more decisions inside the experience itself, so a design flaw that a person once caught and fixed gets repeated with every customer, while pressure grows to connect the economics of acquisition, service and retention.
The setup grew by default over time, and no team has felt it had the authority to change it.
In The Economics of Welfare, first published in 1920, economist Arthur Pigou set out the difference between private and social costs, which became the foundation for how economists think about externalities. His point was that when the consequences of a decision land on someone other than the decision-maker, the decision doesn't fully account for them.
Org charts create the same problem inside a company: when one function makes experience decisions and three others pay for them, the organization is running an internal externality.
WOW has made the service-side version of this case before: cut service costs in isolation and they come back later as repeat contacts and lost customers.
The most expensive version is customers leaving. Expectations get set before the sale by teams judged on winning new business, and when the company can't deliver on them, the retention team absorbs the loss several quarters later, when it's hard to trace back to the original decision.
Qualtrics found that after a negative experience, 34% of consumers cut back their spending with the company and another 13% stop spending with it altogether.
Operational costs are harder to spot, because a workaround built around a broken process starts as a favor and slowly hardens into permanent cost. The extra hours and staff never get traced back to the decision that created them, so the department that caused them never has to account for them.
Pigou's answer was to make the people who make a decision pay for its consequences. Inside a company, that means each part of the customer journey belongs to the function responsible for the customer at that point, budget consequences included, so product answers for it inside the product, service for the support queue, and operations for fulfillment.
The usual instinct is to set up a committee, but that tends to fail because a committee spreads the cost around without assigning it to anyone. Each function gets a say, but the budgets stay the same, so in practice the company keeps working the way it did before.
The handoffs between functions need a named person responsible for them too. A customer who buys, gets onboarded and then calls support crosses three internal boundaries along the way, and the handoffs nobody is responsible for are where the answers to those two questions drift furthest apart.
The customer record is the toughest area to get right. Every function closes out its own channel when the call ends, the ticket is resolved or the email thread is archived, and each of those choices makes sense for the team making it. The result is a customer nobody fully knows, and every team that deals with that customer next pays for it. That makes the customer record a useful test of whether shared responsibility is working: what customers tell one team has to be kept where the next team can find it. Some organizations now keep a persistent thread of what each customer says across every conversation, one that every team reads from, so the next team starts where the last one left off.
Once experience is treated as an operating cost, it should get what operating costs get: a budget line and a regular review where service cost, customer losses and operational workload are looked at together as one picture of the customer. Each line in that review belongs to a function that owns both the budget and the decision behind it, which is what keeps the review from turning into the committee.
Marketing still decides what the company promises customers and how it talks to them, and it still drives demand. That work gets harder, because service, product and operations now sit in the same review and can say whether they're able to deliver what marketing promised, which is how the review catches an expectation gap before it turns into lost customers.
On the revenue side, WOW has already argued for replacing marketing-sourced attribution with a single commercial system. Sharing responsibility for the experience is the operational side of the same change.
Marketing also brings a skill the other functions are rarely organized around, which is seeing the whole journey from the customer's side, and sharing responsibility gives marketing many more places to use it.
In this model each function answers for its own stretch of the experience, and marketing sets the standard across all of them.
Whose budget takes the hit when the experience fails? Were those people in the room when it was designed?
Leaders can ask these questions regularly, starting this quarter with the last three experience failures that cost the business money. In WOW's client work, that exercise usually comes before any experience work gets scoped, because the answers decide who needs to be in the room.
Where the teams paying for the failure were in the room when the experience was designed, the cost sits with the people making the decisions, and the experience tends to improve. Where they weren't, the P&L keeps paying for the org chart, and customers will notice the difference at the competitors who fixed this first.
The digital experience should be owned by the function responsible for the customer at each stage of the journey, with that stage’s budget consequences attached. Product owns the experience inside the product, service owns the support queue and operations owns fulfillment, while marketing sets the standard for how the company presents itself across all of them.
An internal externality occurs when one department makes a decision and a different department’s budget absorbs the cost. The idea comes from economist Arthur Pigou, who argued in 1920 that decisions ignore consequences that land on someone else. In customer experience, it describes marketing designing journeys whose failures are paid for by service and operations.
Customer experience committees often fail because they give every function a voice without changing who pays for experience failures. Budgets stay where they were, so costs keep landing on teams that had no say in the decision. Shared ownership works when each part of the journey has a named owner who controls both the budget and the decision.
A poor customer experience costs businesses through lost spending and added service workload. Qualtrics XM Institute found in 2025 that after a negative experience, 34% of consumers reduce their spending with the company and 13% stop spending with it entirely. Operational costs add to that as teams build workarounds that harden into permanent expense.
When experience ownership is shared, marketing still owns what the company promises customers and how it talks to them, and it continues to drive demand. Marketing also sets the experience standard across the other functions, because it is the team organized to see the whole journey from the customer’s side.
CONNECT WITH US
STAY IN THE LOOP! Join our email list.
By submitting this form, you agree to receive our future communications.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA. Google's Privacy Policy and Terms of Services apply.
© 2025 Whereoware, Inc. All rights reserved.
