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.
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).
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.
“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.
Find out if your company has disjointed metrics and learn three steps to help you gain traction on connecting cross functional metrics.
Separate motivation, disjointed metrics and inconsistent customer experiences illustrate a lack of commitment across the silos for treating customers as a key corporate asset.
Get six critical checkpoints for a Chief Customer Officer.
People go where they smell the green and where they feel the glory. But glory around customer performance is not very common.
It’s time to begin every meeting by understanding the current state of customer profitability. Keep asking for key customer growth metrics (customers coming in, customers going out, and the net effect) until someone can provide the answers.
Keep your focus on the top customer priorities instead of the over-reactive path to another funky task force. Your action step is to retool accountability.
Annual planning is perhaps one of the greatest missed opportunities regarding customers. Everyone’s budgets and plans get cobbled together. We miss the opportunity to strategically forge ahead on key things that would have an impact for customers.
Are you capitalizing on annual planning? Do you utilize data, customer feedback and real time outcomes to manage customers as assets?
The CCO reduces dueling silos by 1) uniting operations; 2) identifying cross-silo dependencies; and 3) evaluating the silo impact across the customer experience.
The grand outcome of dueling silos is the random and inconsistent treatment delivered to customers. It is our organization charts that emerge most clearly to customers when they do business with us, certainly not a unified brand experience.
Without the guideposts of metrics to keep us in line, the delivery of service frequently goes up and down based on the mood, competence, or opinions of the person interacting with the customer. This is what I call biorhythmic service. The front line, not the company, individually makes decisions on what the brand will mean to customers, and that changes from day to day, from person to person.
