Why a CCO? Untangle Disjointed Customer Metrics

“Score” means different things to different silos. This leaves a mess of disjointed metrics that don’t add up to a good experience for customers.

How to Tell if Your Company Has Disjointed Metrics

  • Lack of clarity across the organization
  • Lack of measurement of customer profitability or customer metrics. This breeds a lack of alignment around what’s important to measure regarding customers. Separate silo-specific operational objectives are created. These objectives usually don’t link the parts of the organization together to understand the net effect on the customer relationship.
  • Success metrics are typically operational goals rather than customer goals that tie back to the flow of customers, the profitability of customers, and reasons for retention or defection of customers.
  • Business objectives tracked at the highest levels and defining success for the company are more often than not inward looking. Typical objectives tend to be about the business outcome, not how to achieve customer outcomes.
  • (And finally) The organization usually does not have a grasp on how to measure the movement of customer behavior down the relationship cycle with the company. Without someone pushing everyone together to understand how to define and measure these critical points, customer behavior will not be measured.

Cross-Functional Metrics Are Unnatural to the Corporate Machine

As a result of disjointed goals and metrics, the brand and customer profitability are eroded. Customers leave due to service failures and lack of differentiation.

An unreliable customer experience can be attributed to:

  • Separate silo-specific operational objectives
  • President reports by operation versus by customer group or customer experience
  • Inconsistent operational metrics created separately
  • Little collaboration on company wide customer objectives and what that means operationally
  • Lack of comprehensive metrics
  • Lack of understanding what motivates the customer to increase their purchase behaviors, company loyalty and profitability
  • Lack of measurement of customer profitability or customer metrics

Take Action:  Connect Disjointed Customer Metrics

Step 1. Fill out the chart  with all the different metrics on people’s scorecard by silo today.

The results will give you traction on why there’s a need to unscramble the “spaghetti bowl” of mixed metrics and uncoordinated goals getting in the way of customer growth.

Step 2. Next, use the simple Kick-Start Activity.

Start with just 10 key interaction points where you can begin to connect the metrics.
Step 3. Finally… try this simple elevator speech to explain one important function of the CCO role:

“The Chief Customer Officer unites disjointed goals and metrics which drive the disjointed experiences we deliver to customers.”

Want more details? Read pages 70-72 from my book, “Chief Customer Officer.”

 

5 comments to " Why a CCO? Untangle Disjointed Customer Metrics "

  • Jeanne, I love your CCO initiative. I wish more online businesses and software companies would take your comments to heart. I have a feeling that software and tech is lagging by the consumer sector with regard to adoption of customer centric metrics (and a CCO function in general). Do you know whether this is true? Also, not sure you saw Omer Minkara’s research http://bit.ly/NOLyWU that finds that those who centralize customer intelligence (which includes metrics and measurement, but also operationalization of the metrics) will have 3x higher customer retention and 20% year over year customer value growth (as compared to <1%). Lastly, not sure it fits this post, but have you looked at lagging versus leading customer indicators? Things like customer satisfaction or NPS in my view are lagging, whereas things like service usage and adoption (maybe I am speaking from a online service/software lens here) are more leading indicators of future customer happiness and revenues. Thoughts?

    • jeanne

      Hi Dominique
      I am so pleased that you are finding this content valuable! Writing it, it is really my goal to support you in the field who are doing this work now inside your companies.

      Regarding Tech, the industry is coming around. However, being driven by technology, these companies are frequently product focused so are lagging in understanding the need and importance of knitting the experience that connects the technology and product for the overall customer experience. The “if we build it, they will come” approach still permeates as you know it sounds like.

      I totally agree that organizations have randomized their ability to understand and proactively and re-actively manage customer experiences. This is because the silos own their data based on the execution of operational tasks and the data has not been linked together. This is one of the key roles of a CCO type person.

      And finally, yes…I am a proponent of the fact that your lagging indicators such as NPS or other survey data should simply validate what you already know – based on “real time” leading customer experience indicators such as complaint tracking, management of customer process KPI’s and understanding feedback from the field, and social media. Surveys should simply put a numeric value of what you have learned by intently listening in real time.

  • […] them after the purchase. There’s a real risk for a product power core company to deliver a defaulted customer experience, which happens when people don’t plan the handoffs and the experience is random, dependent on the […]

  • […] Wide / Leadership Agreement to do the Work 1. Acknowledgment that there’s a problem (this in itself can take months) 2. Agreement on the […]

  • Hi Jeanne,

    Nicely written – clear and a good call to action.

    Have you seen the new modern open customer metrics framework? http://www.ocmfgroup.org – happy to walk you through it and compare notes. (This framework is completely free and open source licensed.)

Leave a Comment