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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 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.
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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There are skill sets specific to driving customer change that need to be present when doing this customer experience work. They are not obvious or natural skills considered necessary to the running of an operating area.
When you’re making a decision about where the customer work should be led from (customer service or marketing), don’t just layer it on the existing mission. Make sure that you provide the people with the skill sets to get the job done effectively.
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The CCO can provide significant value to the CEO and leadership by framing the scale of the customer experience undertaking and establishing a straw-man roadmap for getting the work accomplished over time.
Once the customer experience roadmap is created, leaders will have a much better idea of the scope of work. And then the president should promote a healthy debate with company leaders and their organizations about how and when the customer work can happen.
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The CEO must set realistic expectations that this is at minimum a five-year path.
The customer experience work is not for the mild-hearted or for the quarterly inclined. People are going to need to understand that this is a multi-year endeavor. It will be the executive sponsor’s job to get everyone to stay the course.
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What the CCO needs most is someone at the highest levels to collaborate with. Someone who is willing to step in and course-correct the action when it stalls. And it will stall. That’s a built-in component to any work that challenges the status quo, which is what the CCO role is meant to do.
This partnership will become the cornerstone for achieving the optimum benefit from your investment in a CCO. When the collaboration is optimized, this partnership will create a nimble and realistic approach to changing the organization.
Demand regular accountability sessions for the sole purpose of identifying and tracking progress with the customer agenda. Don’t make your CCO expend energy and cycles lobbying to get a place on the corporate agenda. That’s the irony to this work that I’ve never quite understood. Why bring someone into the job and then make it nearly impossible that he or she be heard? Instead, establish a set of meetings with the specific focus of discussing and advancing the customer experience work.
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Put the CCO in the position of doing specific and tangible work within the first month of the job.
Make the first order of business driving the metrics of customer loyalty and customer profitability. This is what I call the customer math for your company.
Another potent first-quarter action for a new CCO is to understand how the company collects and uses incoming customer information. This pushes past the concept of the CCO job, moving involvement into the tactical work of the operation.
Establishing acceptance and role clarity of the CCO position begins with the hiring process. The functional vice presidents who will be working with the CCO must be part of the interview loop and decide if this is the right person.
After initiating the CCO job, it’s important to establish the working relationship between the company leadership and the CCO.
Since that book launched, over 50% of all new Customer Executives have read its contents, and I am honored that many have called upon me for support, as I have had the privilege of coaching many Chief Customer Officer and Customer Experience Officers into their positions or supporting them to get traction where work has stalled. We have made great strides together, working from, improving, and adding to the tools first laid out in this book.
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This work by Jeanne Bliss and CustomerBLISS is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
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