As more and more brands look to define their digital experience (DX) approach, one of the recurring questions being asked is who — if anyone — should ‘own’ digital experience?

Our recent Defining Digital Experience research looked into this question and found that there is a mixed approach. 31% place DX in the hands of marketing, while 27% leave it up to their digital team. By contrast, only 13% place ownership with a specific ‘customer experience’ department, and 14% leave DX dispersed throughout the organization with no clear owner.

Perhaps most interesting, was the discovery that nearly half (48%) of businesses have introduced a dedicated DX department or team. But is this the right approach?

Vital function or additional silo?

When it comes to the broader customer experience, the trend has been to push back on the need for standalone departments. Instead of siloing CX into a particular team, the practical reality is that customer experience has to exist throughout all levels of the business. As the futurist Blake Morgan argues, companies don’t need a dedicated CX team because “customer experience is a culture that needs to be communicated from the CEO down”.

Clearly a separate CX team isn’t the most practical approach, but what about when it comes to digital experience?

Obviously, every department should embody the digital experience, but allowing each to run their own technologies and operate siloed from the rest of the organization risks damaging consistency across the brand.

The DX team: A hub for expertise

One approach that 48% of organizations have adopted to is to create a new dedicated DX team. To place this figure into context, 44% of organizations have a data science team, 52% have a digital analytics and insights team, and 54% have a dedicated design and UX team to help shape their digital experiences.

This dedicated team then acts as a central hub for DX expertise, which then can be used to define the wider DX strategy, goals and approach. Crucially, the team will use technology, data and insight to understand their organization’s customers in more depth across all digital channels.

The benefit of taking this kind of approach is that DX then becomes a specific team’s sole responsibility — meaning that DX will never get lost among other business activities. Some organizations, though, are risking losing focus on DX because they don’t have a dedicated team. For 44% of brands, for example, DX is still very much a merged affair with other departments like marketing, sales, HR and customer service, which naturally have other priorities.

To make sure you don’t lose focus on DX, and to find out more about the trends defining the present (and future) of digital experience download our Defining Digital Experience report: