Customer-focused efforts are often highly reactive because they sync to the cycle of survey results. The results come out; the silos react independently, rinse and repeat. This reactive nature of waiting for the results and then taking actions that chase the score push the work to what I call “whack-a mole” tactics. Fixing things. Project plans or work streams with red, yellow, and green dots.
And the role of the chief customer officer (CCO) is defined as the fix-it person for what currently ails customers, or the one nagging the silos to take action. Despite all this activity (giving a false positive of commitment measured by energy expended), we have not embedded new behaviors for how we understand customers' lives, how we care about their lives, and how we improve their lives. Our work is defined by project plan movement rather than customer life improvement.
The purpose of our work is to galvanize the organization to deliver experiences that customers want to have again – to earn the right to customer-driven growth. But what we sometimes do in these roles is the opposite. Customer-focused actions are one-off reactions to survey results, or to an executive in the field getting direct customer feedback, or to a letter that lands on someone's desk. Information is delivered, the silos react, and the cycle repeats.
As a result, the higher purpose of our work, which is to drive growth, is lost. These efforts then fall prey to being perceived as costs without reward. CEOs and boards want to be customer focused, but without an explicit connection to growth, many consider the work to be:
● A leap of faith.
● Expensive.
● Deterrents to the “real” work.
The Five Customer Leadership Competencies
For customer experience efforts to become valued and considered critical to driving growth they must rise above the fray of being defined as problem solving or chasing survey scores. The work must be defined as building your customer-driven growth engine, with the CCO role as the architect of that engine.
From being a practitioner in the rinse and repeat cycle to coaching CCOs and the C-Suite, I knew I had to find a way to break that cycle. To create a system that shows a clear and simple connection to a return on investment, and gives the CEO that legacy that he or she wants to leave as their mark. That system is these five competencies that will, over time, build your customer-driven growth engine.
The 5 Customer Leadership Competencies connect to growth. They deliver constantly updated information to unite leaders on the most impactful customer priorities, and they shift attitudes from chasing survey scores to caring about and improving customer lives to earn the right to growth.
Here are the benefits of this five-competency business engine:
● They establish the connection to business growth. The five competencies elevate customer experience efforts from getting a score to ‘earning the right’ to growth.
● You build them at your own pace, with actions that are most potent for your culture, your leaders, and the company's ability to take on the work within each competency.
● They build an engine analogous to the familiar process of product development, with distinguishable steps and metrics and performance requirements. These five competencies provide an equal discipline for focused customer experience development.
● They drive a one-company focus on customer experiences by uniting leaders in investing in the most impactful priorities. Competency five, for example, builds a monthly process (called a customer room) to step people into the shoes of the customer, uniting the company to focus on a few critical actions rather than having every silo choosing many tactics separately from one another.
● They specify actions that demystify the role of the customer leadership executive (CCO, CXO, etc.). The role becomes clear, as architect and facilitator of the engine, uniting leaders to make decisions that improve customers' lives and lead to business growth.
I call these Customer Leadership Competencies because they define the behavior of world-class organizations focused on customers and employees. They impact how these organizations decide to grow, how they lead in unison, how they identify and resolve issues, and how they collectively build a one-company experience.
Below is an introduction of the five competencies that will comprise your customer-driven growth engine. Later in the book there is a full chapter on each competency, along with tools to help you to customize your version of these competencies for your organization. These are:
● Action Lab: Tools and templates to immediately put into use.
● My Rock, My Story: CCO stories on how they united leadership, worked through challenges, and achieved success.
Based on working as a practitioner, and with clients around the globe for over thirty years, here is the real-world approach for how to integrate the discipline and role of customer experience leadership into your operation. Here are the five competencies that define the Chief Customer Officer role and require engagement of the executive team and organization to make them a success.
In Competency 1, the work is to align leaders to make a defining performance metric – the growth or loss of the customer base. The purpose is to shift to a simple understanding of the overall success achieved when a company earns customer-driven growth.
Customer Asset Management is to know what customers actually did to impact business growth or loss versus what they say they might do via survey results.
For example: how many new customers did you bring in this quarter, by volume and value (power of your acquisition engine); how many customers were lost this quarter, by volume and value (power of the experience and value perceived); how many increased their purchases; and how many reduced their level of engagement with you? The key here is to express these outcomes in whole numbers, not retention rates, so the full impact is understood – these numbers represent the lives of customers joining or leaving your company.
This connection can be explained and accepted by your board of directors. And it gives your executives a platform from which they can personally talk about this work, take ownership of it, and connect it to business growth.
The role of the CCO is not to build and then ‘pitch’ these metrics to the C-Suite. It is to unite leaders in establishing customer asset metrics and customer growth behaviors that they will stand behind as a united leadership team. And it is to work to build the engine with them to enable the data so that this information is recurring and refreshed to drive business decisions.
What this means is to know and care about, at the executive level, the shifting behavior within your customer base that indicates if their bond with you is growing or shrinking. And, importantly, it's about engaging your executives in caring about the “WHY?” Why did customers stay or leave, buy more or less, or actively use your products or services more or less?
With this book, you'll be able to start the conversation with your leadership team and engage them in building your version of customer asset metrics. You will be able to engage them in building your company's version of this simple metric, and translating and communicating it across your organization, in a manner that connects to your operation and resonates with your employees.
Martin Hand is Chief Donor/Customer Officer at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, where he is responsible for the overall donor experience, contact center operations, and donor account processing functions. Martin was previously Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at United Continental Holdings.
It takes $2 million per day to operate St. Jude Children's Research Hospital to help save children's lives. Donors caring about these kids have contributed