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 over 75 percent of those funds for more than 50 years. Without them we couldn't have pushed the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20 percent to 80 percent. Therefore we want to connect all of our employees to the importance of how their work impacts donors' lives, and to find effective and simple ways to measure and discuss the growth or shrinkage of our donor base. Our goal is to elevate this donor-centric philosophy across the organization and make the donor experience a key part of how we measure our success.
What we find is that it is most powerful to combine story telling when we deliver this information. We will tell the growth of donors and how many we did not keep, and then we will challenge the organization with the impact of losing donors. We tell this story in both the number of lost donors and also in the value of the donor we lost – to show the potential future revenue of a lost donor.
We show explicitly the incremental growth that we would have if we kept 5 or 10 or 20 percent more donors. And then we attach that information to examples of issues that drive donors away. Now people's work is connected to growth and they have clarity about what they can do about it.
Competency 2 gives leaders a framework for guiding the work of the organization: requiring cross-silo accountability to deliver deliberate customer experiences. It unites the organization in building a framework for ‘earning the right’ to customer asset growth. The role of the CCO is to unite leaders and the organization in building a one-company version of their customer journey.
This means facilitating across the silos to unite them in the development, and understanding of the entire customer journey, versus the silo-based processes that dictate the customer experience (such as the sales process, marketing acquisition process, etc.). It includes focusing the organization on priority one-company experiences. And on changing the conversations from silo-driven conversations to collaborative conversations about customers' lives – their experiences across the journey they have with your organization. Over time, this will evolve leadership language to drive performance along the customer journey, driving accountability to journey stages, not only down silos.
As a result of competency two, questions about silo and project performance will shift to include accountability for customer life improvement. Your customer journey framework will provide a disciplined one-company diagnosis into the reasons behind customer asset growth or loss. And it will establish rigor in understanding and caring about priorities in customers' lives (The real power in journey mapping.)
With this book, you will be able to assess how you currently use your customer journey map as the framework to consistently drive company focus, in your customer listening, experience improvement, and planning efforts. You will learn how other CCOs have avoided the “shiny object” syndrome that journey-mapping is at risk of being today. And you will learn how to move mapping from a one-off activity to the beginning of a competency that drives business behavior.
Lesley Mottla was part of the management team that developed Zipcar's award-winning customer experience and technologies. She just joined LAUNCH, a start-up devoted to reinventing multichannel consumer experiences.
To get started with customer experience, we built a very simple high-level customer journey on one page so everyone could understand it. We call it our eco-system. Here's what's included: At the top are the activities and moments of truth customers go through, in the middle they are bucketed into high-level touchpoints, or stages as some call them. These are what we call “front of the house” – what customers see. Then below the stages are the “back of house” items – the things we have to unite on to deliver seamlessly to the front of the house. Presenting the visual on one page was very important for us in communications and creating understanding.
To build this map we started internally with our people, then we did a lot of observations with customers to build out the specific front-of-house components. When we started working on the micro-processes under these, we got more detailed. But starting here was important to build a one-company view of the Zipcar experience.
Then every year we would create a roadmap using the eco-system visual. Each year we would start with certain themes to focus on. Inside of each theme was the customer experience to be improved or heightened and why, the development, investment, and initiatives. This also included the financial impact and cost to the operation.
We used this singular format consistently every quarter and prior to planning to align and focus and make the work real and tangible.
Competency 3 unites your organization to build a one-company listening system that is constantly refreshed to tell the story of your customers' experience, guided by the customer journey framework. Feedback volunteered from customers as they interact with you, survey and social feedback, ethnography, and other sources of gathered input are assembled into one complete picture, presenting customer perception and value, stage by stage. This alignment of multiple sources of feedback focuses and galvanizes the organization to focus on key areas of improvement connected to customer growth, driving greater results and greater understanding of this work.
The role of the CCO is to engage leaders and the organization to want to be a part of one-company storytelling to unite decision-making and drive cross-company focus and action. That's why I call this competency as building a customer ‘listening path.
With this book, you'll be able to evaluate your current listening system to determine how to evolve to the comprehensive customer listening path of competency two. This will enable you to utilize multiple sources of information to move your company past survey-score addiction, to customer experience storytelling – prompting caring about customers' lives, and improvements that earn the right to growth.
Graham Atkinson, is Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at Walgreens, the largest drug-retailing chain in the United States, with responsibility for the
