Creating the Chief Customer Officer Role

What’s your story for creating the Chief Customer Officer role in your organization?

Below is a brief, shorthand description for the Chief Customer Officer.

• If you’re just starting out, you can use it as the starting point for a job description, modifying it as necessary for your organization.
• If you’ve been at this work for a while, how do you execute the tasks to drive culture change and do the customer experience work? (What’s in your CX toolbox?)

The goals of the Chief Customer Officer:

• Engage the organization in managing customer relationships, revenue, and profit.
• Create a persistent focus on the customer in the actions the company takes.
• Drive the organization to work together for optimum customer experience delivery.
• Support leaders in their role as cultural leaders in the transformation journey.

What’s your story? What are your successes? What are your customer experience challenges?

As a change agent inside the company, the Chief Customer Officer performs four specific functions:

1. Establishes metrics for defining the relationship with customers

Partners: Usually finance and marketing for guerrilla metrics; issue trending requires engagement and alignment with all functional vice presidents

• • Guerrilla metrics; simple metrics to manage customers as an asset.
  • Voice of the Customer competency development.
    • Real-time issue trending and tracking (such as complaints).
    • Corralling all the surveys and uniting a company-wide approach.
    • Optimizing for “listening” pipe opportunities, web, social media, field, etc.
  • Create a united platform for understanding and taking action.

2. Influences cross-company agreement on how to deliver greatest value to customers

Partners: Marketing and finance (and sales, depending on the organization)

• • Define what customers value – how to determine the differentiating experience to be delivered.
  • Determine what customers to invest in.
  • Decide where to make investment decisions, that is, the highest-impact contacts and efforts.
  • Create a common language set and definitions for the customer experience.

3. In partnership with leaders, drives accountability through cross-company data and metrics

Partners: The chief executive and all functional vice presidents

• • Facilitate the development of the accountability action chain, establishing the approaches and implementation of research to understand customer loyalty and return on investment (ROI).
  • Work with leaders to identify baseline metrics for tracking interaction with customers.
  • Drive tracking and reporting to get to reliability in key interactions.
  • Lead the accountability forums – when to meet with whom to drive accountability.
  • Work with leaders on messages, reinforcing, recommendations for recognition, and driving the culture change forward.

4. Clarifies a common approach and process for driving the work across the organization

Partners: All of the functional vice presidents

• • Identify operational accountability cross-functional alliances.
  • Facilitate working together across the silos instead of separately within them.
  • Instill the discipline of process change and change management into the organization.

Take Action: Download the Chief Customer Officer Job Description