8. CEO and CCO Should Demystify the Customer Experience Roadmap

Final part of the series, “What the CEO Needs to Do to Ensure Chief Customer Officer Success.” (8 of 8)

To create the wholesale shift for an organization to cohesively deliver customer experiences is a huge undertaking. Yet it’s quickly agreed to when that charge comes from the president: “We must improve customer relationships and profitability.”

Who wouldn’t salute that flag? But what flag did the company salute?

What did they agree to accomplish?

Therein lies the problem: the CEO’s request for customer commitment contains no direction.

The organization doesn’t know what they’ve agreed to do or how they’ll get it done. The Chief Customer Officer can provide significant value to the CEO and company leadership by framing the scale of the undertaking and establishing a straw-man roadmap for getting the work accomplished over time.

Once the roadmap is created, leaders will have a much better idea of what the work is. And then the president should promote a healthy debate with company leaders and their organizations about how and when the work can happen.

They should reach agreement on:

After the CEO and company leaders put this amount of discussion and rigor into framing the work they will have a much clearer case to lay out to the organization.

Learn more about the five customer experience competencies.

Written by Jeanne Bliss under on July 20, 2012 2 Comments

2 comments to " 8. CEO and CCO Should Demystify the Customer Experience Roadmap "

  • Reply
    Trish Voskovitch
    July 23, 2012 AT 10:22AM

    The customer experience has to start from the top down. “Improve customer relationships” is a great goal, but how exactly do you plan on doing that? The more exact your plans the better chance at success.

    • Reply
      jeanne
      July 24, 2012 AT 9:45AM

      Trish,
      You are right, this is just one component of a larger roadmap. The posts build to give more detailed information. Improve customer relationships comes after valuing the customer asset, building a listening engine and muscle, identifying the touchpoints and prioritizing key moments of truth that are critical to delivery of reliable and ultimately differentiated experiences.

      I am glad you talk about specificity of plans here because this is where many of these efforts fail. They stay at the high level “hand wave” of “go fix customer relationships” without a clear process or cycle for how to get there. These are also new skill sets that may need to be brought into the organization to drive customer experience driven process change, connecting silos and managing the “OD” – organizational dynamics aspects of encouraging, rewarding and leading.

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