Today’s customers require access to a company’s offerings through many forms of media in order to meet their preferences and lifestyles. Furthermore, they also require a consistent customer experience across these channels since they can easily choose to change vendors if they do not receive support that meets their expectations. So multi-channel accessibility and consistency of experience across those channels have become essential components to winning the competition for customers. More and more, companies are recognizing the financial benefits of customer satisfaction and its proportionate relationships with loyalty and profitability.
With accessibility and the consistency of customer experience in mind, many companies have turned to creating a chief customer officer (CCO) position in the C-Suite. This still-emerging and evolving role can be defined as: the executive responsible for the total relationship with an organization’s customers. The challenge has been to tie this position to financial gains and losses to clearly justify the investment. A recent study conducted by the Chief Customer Officer Council has shed some light on the effectiveness of CCO’s over a two year period and the numbers are compelling.
This research shows that 67% of evaluated companies saw positive fiscal effects during the tenure of the CCO, with an average growth excess of industry of 5.98%. Given the minimum threshold of $1B annual revenue, this represents a difference of hundreds of millions of dollars. On the flip side, 33% of companies experienced an average of 5.2% decrease in growth excess of industry. Clearly, not all positive or negative results can be attributed to the CCO. It is equally clear however that the influence of the CCO is positively correlated with improved company fiscal performance.
In an effort to identify the impact a chief customer officer has on company financials, the Chief Customer Officer Council researchers narrowed a population of more than 300 companies to a sample of 51 CCOs at 46 separate companies with a CCO in place for at least two years and with nominal revenues of one billion dollars (US) in 2010. For each of these companies, sales revenue, operating margin, and industry sales data were gathered. Where possible, data were gathered from five years prior to the CCO’s appointment up to the current time or end of the CCO’s employment, whichever was shorter. To eliminate overall industry effects from altering the analysis of the companies’ effectiveness over a period of time, company growth excess of industry was computed by subtracting industry from company growth for each year evaluated.
Here are four key findings from this research:
1. Customer Centricity is a two-year investment
2. The CCO must show contribution to long-term revenue and profitability improvements
3. In absence of growth, the CCO may help prevent a slide
4. Every company says it is customer centric but few truly are
Stay tuned for part two of this two-part series, wherein I’ll elaborate on the findings above and offer recommendations for managing them.
*This article is the first in a two-part series excerpted from The Impact of the CCO, available for free download from the CCO Council website here.
