The Chief Customer Officer: Put Customers in the Boardroom
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, May 12, 2010
Have you noticed an empty seat at your company's boardroom? Look around the table, and you will see the usual suspects have taken their places around the CEO. Finance has its chief in the form of a CFO. The IT department gets a CIO. Then there's the Chief Marketing Officer. But the customer doesn't get its chief.
According to one Vovici/CGA survey, 75% of businesses responding had at least an informal customer experience management strategy, but only 16% had a head of customer experience at board level. Companies without customer experience heads have less loyal customers than those who do. By establishing a chief customer officer (CCO ) role within your organization, you in effect put your customers in the boardroom; the CCO will lead your efforts to capture customer feedback, analyze it, and act on it to create better service and a more successful outcome.
Without a CCO, customer advocacy and action is dispersed and diluted. Marketing worries about the customer as a lead; Sales worries about the customer as a prospect; Service worries about the customer as a problem; but there is nobody to think about the customer holistically as they experience and engage with your brands, your products, and the legions of employees who represent your business on the front lines every day.
The Chief Customer Officer should strive to manage and build the brand by strengthening its emotional connection to customers. The CCO should enroll, empower and engage customers: enroll customers in providing regular feedback and insight, empower them to co-create new products and services with the business, and engage them intellectually and emotionally. Newly engaged customers in turn evangelize the business to others, sharing in the success of its new offerings.
Customer engagement begins with customer experience management. Few organizations consider the customer experience as a whole, let alone as something designed, implemented, and measured. A CCO can help design the customer experience, beginning with a program that closes the customer feedback loop.
Just as most organizations have not taken a holistic view of the customer, most haven't even taken a holistic view of customer feedback. Too often, feedback lives in silos: Sales has its lost-business survey; Service has its follow-up survey; Product Management has its irregular planning survey. In fact, Fortune 500 firms often field hundreds of surveys per year to their major accounts. Fifteen years ago customer data was dispersed throughout the organization, rather than centrally managed; enter the customer relationship management system. Similarly, today, customer feedback is dispersed throughout the organization, with each department collecting what it thinks is important. The Chief Customer Officer needs to centrally coordinate today's fragmented feedback in order to build tomorrow's customer-driven, designed and consistent customer experiences.
The key role for the Chief Customer Officer is to lead Customer Experience Management:
- To learn what customers value and how they feel about your organization and the current experience you provide.
- To interpret this feedback and prioritize the most important issues.
- To enact change that closes the gap between customer expectations and the actual experience delivered.
- Finally, to monitor key metrics to ensure that your organization continually improves the customer experience.
When it comes to the Voice of the Customer, most organizations listen to it, but not enough organizations act on it. To build loyalty, an organization must effectively prioritize customer issues and implement improvement programs; an organization must consolidate feedback from multiple channels, analyze it across different customer segments, and identify key themes. Statistical analysis from survey research helps prioritize actions, and root-cause analysis helps identify underlying issues and business impact. Through collaboration with customer care and services teams across all lines of businesses, a Chief Customer Officer can identify customer needs and uncover the key drivers of customer issues across geographies and industries for all stages of the customer lifecycle. Under the leadership of the CCO, customer-driven programs can then be designed to address opportunities in a consistent manner throughout the company. This aligns business operations and executive priorities with those of the customers. Thus requirements are continually translated into action.
Put customers in the boardroom, and they will become your evangelists. A C-level title signals the seriousness of your company's commitment to customers and of its dedication to a CEM program. A C-level title can lead the charge from insight to action across the global enterprise. If you want customers to be the chief concern of your business, you need to fill that empty seat in the boardroom: you need a Chief Customer Officer.