This is where you build your discipline to know before customers tell you if your operation is reliable or unreliable in experience delivery in the moments that matter most. The role of the CCO is to drive executive appetite for wanting to know about these interruptions in customers' lives, simplifying how they are delivered, and facilitating a one-company response to these key operational performance areas. It is to facilitate the competency of building a deliberate process for customer experience improvement that rivals the clarity and processes that most companies have for product development.
With this book, you will be able to evaluate how proactive your efforts are today in uniting leadership focus to identify and provide resources to improve priority customer experiences. You will receive information so that you can engage leaders in working with the silos to pull out the few critical metrics they should care about with as much rigor as they care about achieving sales goals. And you will gain a perspective from CCOs on how they built a path for embedding the competency of focus, capacity creation, and reward for one-company experience improvement.
Lambert Walsh is Vice President and General Manager at Adobe, where he leads Adobe's efforts to retain and grow long-term relationships with customers and partners across all segments and lines of business. He has led customer success at Adobe since 2007.
At Adobe, we now have performance indicators that leaders across Adobe are accountable to, that build a connection between core system performance and delivering exceptional customer experiences with our services. Typical Software as a Service (SaaS) operational metrics around availability and uptime remain important, but they are internal metrics about how we are doing. Additional quality of service indicators will measure how we are performing in relation to what customers need in real time. For example, we may see that a system is up and running but a subset of customers may be experiencing disruption in performance, impeding tasks they want to perform. When we look at only the traditional system performance we risk getting a false positive of our performance and the customers' experience. With additional measures that reflect exactly what customers are seeing we can make adjustments in real time to ensure that we deliver the best experience possible.
This is your “prove it to me” competency. For this work to be transformative and stick, it must be more than a customer manifesto. Commitment to customer-driven growth is proven with actions and choices. To emulate culture, people need examples. They need proof.
Culture must be proven with decisions and operational actions that are deliberate in steering how a company will and will not treat customers and employees. Competency five puts into practice united leadership behaviors to enable and earn sustainable customer asset growth. It focuses them on what they will and will not do to grow the business.
The role of the CCO is to work with the leadership team in building the consistent behaviors, decision-making, and company engagement that will prove to the organization that leaders are united in their commitment to earn the right to customer-driven growth.
You must move beyond the customer manifesto and translate the commitment to actions that people understand and can emulate. That's what competency five helps you to accomplish for your organization. In this book you will receive specific examples of a set of leadership actions that are foundational for the success of a customer experience transformation. And you will be provided with examples from chief customer officers on how they united their company's leadership in these critical actions. You will have the information to determine how to engage as a leadership team and where the critical roadblocks are that you must tackle.
Tish Whitcraft is Chief Customer Officer at OpenX, responsible for the partner experience and all revenue growth and retention. OpenX is a global leader in web and mobile advertising technology that optimizes the economic potential of digital media companies through advertising technology.
In a lot of organizations we put too many rules, policies, and frameworks in place, thinking that these will make a scalable experience. But a scalable experience occurs when we begin giving people the ability to make the right decisions. At OpenX, for example, we learned that we had to give account managers permission to make decisions to grow and scale the business.
One of the things we did was to simply begin having regular weekly meetings with account managers to enforce and go through specific customer issues they were having. We'd have them recommend what they thought should be done – and then give them the authority to just do it. Simple, right? But somewhere along the way someone didn't give them permission to make decisions. So they thought that was a rule they had to follow. And they stopped taking action and started asking first. And that got in the way of solving customer issues and creating value. It impeded growth and our ability to scale.
We also work deliberately to show customers that we have confidence in our own people and trust their decisions. We are always in meetings with customers – so we showcase their account manager as the one who owns the decisions on the account. If we make them get approval on everything – then the customer will see their account manager as a paper pusher they have to go around to get a decision.
The Five Competencies Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine
When these five competencies are embedded into the organization with committed leadership behavior, they are so clear that they become the work of the organization. There is no difference between the “customer” work and the “real” work. The five competencies connect to growth, and they shift attitudes to caring about and improving customer lives.
These five competencies unite the organization to identify and improve customer priorities with most impact. Today, surveys come out, and silos react to them. Research is done and they react. Products are developed with varying degrees of customer understanding. Everything is a distinct project without an overarching framework. Work streams begin without lines of sight to each other.
These competencies are designed with a clear connection to one another so that over time you have a repeatable and deliberate customer-driven growth engine. And please keep this in mind: the goal is that you build this over time. The customer leadership executive's role is to engage the organization to phase the build-out so that it sticks.
Five Competencies = Engine for Growth
Over time, one of this engine's most potent impacts is in prioritizing investments for customer-driven growth by shifting the annual planning process. Instead of starting with the silos, leaders start with the customers' lives, identify priorities, and then determine collectively the investments to improve them to earn the right to growth. Without alignment among your executive team to regularly review the customer journey that this engine affords, investments are not fully optimized. Tactical actions are budgeted and implemented by silo, but complete customer experiences that drive growth are not improved. Rinse and repeat.
Claire Burns is Chief Customer Officer at MetLife. She drives the customer-centricity strategy and actions to build customer empathy and improve the experience of purchasing, maintaining, and enhancing customer coverage with MetLife. MetLife, Inc., is a global provider of insurance, annuities, and employee benefit programs.
As we go into our planning cycle we prepare the organization with a “State of the Customer” report. In this report we walk through what has improved and the lingering issues.
● We identify highlights and priorities by customer journeys specific to regions or countries.
● In the report we synthesize the customer experience for the past year, gathering insight from multiple sources: trended complaints, inbound feedback from the web and call centers, social media feedback, operational performance, and survey results.
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