Rather than giving you a “one size fits all” solution, I’m giving you 10 questions to evaluate and understand your business from your customers’ point of view. The questions will lead you to answers best suited for your business, for your people, and for your customers.
CCO Role & Success Factors
Bill Gore wanted a company where employees’ spirit grew by what they accomplished, not by which corporate scrimmage they had won—where more time was spent generating ideas rather than generating ways to cover one’s backside. He decided to create a “non-organization” approach for his new company that would inspire creativity in its employees. He envisioned a “lattice” structure where people would work interconnectedly with each other rather than through a hierarchy. Gore wanted “leaders” to emerge through the ideas they presented and the commitment received to put ideas into action. “Power” is about ideas and the ability to get them sold.
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The silo-by-silo approach to annual planning is at odds with what customer experiences require: an across-the-enterprise approach to defining priorities and focusing company resources on a unified plan for improvement.
There are three steps customer leaders need to take to get to a company-wide customer investment plan. 1. Align with the CFO, CIO and CMO. 2. Aggregate intelligence to identify the most important investments: Breathe life into an annual customer plan. 3. Pull together the customer investment budget.
You will provide a service that is sorely lacking by bringing together the separate factions of the organization to see the business comprehensively and from the customers’ perspective.
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In most companies, each silo owns its cordoned-off part of its contact with customers, but that’s it. This leads to the fractured and incongruent experiences we deliver to customers. We lose sight of them when they fall into the quicksand between the silos.
Customer quicksand is borne out of three things: motivation (the beacons people follow), metrics (how success is defined) and mechanics (the customer experience across the silos).
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Just like Tom Sawyer, the Chief Customer Officer (or Chief Experience Officer) must create a compelling reason for people to participate in the customer work. A CCO needs to get people to want to come and paint the fence. I call this ability the “Tom Sawyer formula.” And it works when the CCO is in lockstep partnership with the CEO.
The shorthand for the CCO role is reframe the work of the business through the lens of how the customer experiences your company. Start clarifying the customer work across the organization by utilizing three tools to help you define delivery, accountability and metrics. Tool 1: Define Customer Stages. Tool 2: Identify Cross Silo Dependencies. Tool 3: Evaluate the Silo Impact Across the Customer Experience.
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The CCO must get explicit agreement from leadership that she/he will receive credit for any progress in aligning the company for change besides measuring the change itself. Follow a simple path to rate CCO performance in the first year when the customer experience work and its outcomes may appear the vaguest.
Option 4 is the most challenging structure. A strong functional leader must take on the development of a new focus area for the company. New skill sets must be developed to drive the significant change that’s required throughout the organization. Functional experts will need to be corralled continually for work to be advanced.
This is not insurmountable. In fact, this is the default approach that most companies take for all the reasons that are rattling around in your head right now.
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What you’re signing up for here is to take someone running an operating area (such as customer service) and layering the cross-functional customer work on top of that. This can be done, but it takes a CCO with an extreme amount of energy and very robust pull in the organization.
It’s critical that the functional leader’s operation is a well-oiled machine before layering on customer experience work. It’s also important that the operating area has proven to the organization it already practices optimum customer practices that others want to emulate.
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The customer experience team retains development of the skill sets to drive change. However, the team of functional experts does not report to this group. They do the CX work when they have time. This may be the only option for many organizations.
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