In the past ten 10 years, since writing and publishing Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action, it has been my privilege to be called upon by nearly every business vertical around the world – to coach their Chief Customer Officer and executive leadership teams in their transformation toward customer-driven growth. Insurance, technology, healthcare, retail, financial services, hospitality, manufacturing, telecommunications, Software-as-Service companies, service businesses, government agencies, and many other industry leaders have reached out for clarity and a road map on how to navigate these often-unwieldy waters. (Usually starting with a somewhat urgent call asking for help defining the work and the role. You are not alone!) Like you, they needed a way to break this work up and accomplish it in a realistic manner.
We have made great strides together. And we have stories to tell. These stories from both clients and customer leadership executives representing nearly every business vertical are peppered throughout this book in case studies entitled “My Rock, My Story.” This title is a nod to Sisyphus, who we all at times feel akin to, pushing the rock up the hill.
And that is why I have written this book for you. I wanted to provide this advanced toolkit as your success accelerator and road map. To that end, this is essentially a completely new book with specific tales of customization and implementation comprised from working with practitioners in multiple industries, organizations, and cultures.
Through working with leaders around the world, heightened specifics and tactics have emerged to increase success for this role and customer-centric business transformations. Through coaching, more tools have been established to provide greater clarity for CEOs and executive teams seeking to understand the value in this role and their personal commitment required to make it a success. Through coaching, five Customer Leadership Competencies have emerged that create an engine for reliably leading this work.
Around the world, the customer leadership executive role (chief customer officer, vice president of customer experience, etc.) has been embraced in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer organizations. Leaders in these roles have worked to figure out how they should organize, act, and make decisions to earn the right to business growth by embracing employees and customers and delivering an experience they want to have again and tell others about. There have been many versions of success, as you probably know well from living within the constraints of trying to do this work across a silo-driven organization. And many opportunities remain – through learning from each other and sharing our stories.
Helping you achieve success as CCO with your executive team and organization depends upon actions and behaviors that have been developed, practiced, and matured through my many years as a practitioner and coach. I will share these with you.
● The common denominators to customer leadership executive success.
● Roadblocks for organizations that were stopped short.
● Five Customer Leadership Competencies of world-class companies.
● What changes when the five competencies become a part of the way you go to market, develop products, reward people, and conduct annual planning.
Many things have not changed since I wrote Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action. Organizations still rely primarily on areas of expertise or silos to run the business. Annual planning is still done (mostly) silo by silo. Lagging indicator surveys still often drive point-in-time action to try to improve results (not always the customer experience) and the customer is often still the only one experiencing the outcome of this disconnection.
What has changed is the power that social media has given customers to speak out about their experiences. I am supremely enthused about this forcing function! Lagging survey metrics can't catch surges of happiness and unhappiness that customers express in social media to make an impact on customer growth and profitability. And the cherry-picked silo-based projects that emerge from these results are not solving the problems causing customers to depart or grow.
The monthly CEO report out still goes from silo vice president to silo vice president in C-Suite meetings. But there is growing angst that this dissected view is not the right one to make focused and impactful customer growth investments.
And with that, more companies are trying to figure out how to organize and unite to tackle experiences end to end. It's a noble commitment…but still misunderstood. Now more than ever with the rise of social media, big data, and the surge of focus on customer experience, CCOs are at risk of chasing the ‘shiny object’ of the moment than at embedding a set of behaviors that will transform their organizations.
So with all of that in mind, here is the inside of my new and improved clock on how to become what I call “the human duct tape” of the organization. Chief Customer Officer 2.0 is for you, the…
● Customer leadership executives with the role today
● CEOs and boards considering the role for their organization
● Those moving to CCO from another role
● People aspiring to bring the role into their organization
● Executive Teams working with the CCO
● Recruiters placing customer leadership executive positions
Thanks for all the years of reaching out and trusting me to help you along the way. I wrote this for you, as always, to have my hand on the small of your back, encouraging and prodding you to push that rock up that hill. I am honored we get to spend this time together again. Supporting you is my life's work. Thanks for taking the time to read this new and enriched material.
Your Reading Road Map for Chief Customer Officer 2.0
Having prescribed to all my clients that they need to give employees and customers a road map on the experience that they deliver, the following is your reading road map for Chief Customer Officer 2.0. This book is assembled to enable you to work with your leadership team to establish a one-company approach and understanding of what it means to focus on “customer experience.” It will provide you with a framework that can be customized to your organization so that you can earn the right to customer-driven growth. Through the “Action Lab” tools and “My Rock, My Story” case studies, it will challenge you to determine how your current efforts compare to others doing the same, it will provide encouragement in storytelling, and it will provide practical actions you can implement.
Chapter 1
Chief Customer Officer Role Clarity
A Chief Customer Officer is successful when he or she can simplify how the organization works together to achieve customer-driven growth, engage the leadership team, and connect the work to a return on investment. That's what everyone wants to know about this role. What does the Chief Customer Officer do, how is the work staged and what is its impact? You'll find the answers to these questions in this book.
What you will also find, which is equally important, is how to unite the leadership team and organization to ‘earn the right’ to growth by making decisions and orienting business operations to improve customers' lives. This is the elusive and challenging element of this work that, when neglected, can turn it into a program or project rather than a transformation. Sustainable change will occur only when this work goes beyond project plans and status updates and is grounded in caring about customers' lives. It's the path to growth the five competencies outlined in this book provides.
What I know from over thirty years as a CCO practitioner and coach to customer leadership executives and their C-Suite, is that we've got to take the reactive nature out of this work. Our work must be about embedding behaviors and competencies in the organization: Competencies that will transform how the business and operation are run, to achieve customer-driven growth.
If