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 you became the customer “Velcro man” or “Velcro woman” where all customer issues were strewn in your path upon assuming this role, you know that establishing role clarity and executive alignment is paramount. Without it, you run the risk of being defined as the fix-it person. And that's not who you want to be.
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.
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