including loyalty.
What I first encountered at Walgreens was that the stores were receiving a simplistic survey report with results by store. Often it gave them results from only 20 to 30 customers with only the survey score numeric. There was very little if any commentary behind the score. They might receive a few ad hoc comments. As you could guess, from these results, store managers could easily explain or rationalize bad results away.
Then, in our leadership meetings, we had a monthly report-out from sales and marketing. In this meeting there were just two lines of information reported on that applied to customers: the exit store survey results and the competitive results. One meeting's discussion on these results elicited an almost cathartic conversation, which opened the door to change.
We didn't really understand what this customer number meant or the impact. One of the first things we did to put meat on the bones of this information was to understand what we had in terms of tools and processes and start to build out a robust listening system with understanding and meaning behind the data we were gathering.
Within my first six months, we rebuilt our approach to give each store higher response rates with more credible feedback that was harder to refute, we built a program to identify how each store was performing to encourage a friendly horse-race among stores, and we did the heavy lifting for store managers to identify a few key things per store to focus on.
Over time, we created a central repository of multiple categories of listening feedback and turned it into a consistent scorecard on business performance. We also looked at behavioral loyalty so we could connect to improvements that would drive a return on investment. With analytics we were able to show how behaviors changed over time and how we needed to achieve different results to achieve customer-buying patterns that drive growth. Importantly, this was not just a rudimentary part of our leadership meetings – but presented as important as the report-out of financial results.
Competency 4 builds out your “Revenue Erosion Early-Warning Process.” We need leaders to care about operational performance in processes that impact priority moments in your customers' journey with you. These are the intersection points that impact customer decisions to stay, leave, buy more, and recommend you to others.
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
