A Chief Customer Officer must embed two new competencies inside the operation:
1. Customer Experience Reliability – Resolving issues that create irregularity and lack of reliability in your customer experience.
This means:
- Managing the customer as an asset
- Listening to the customer across the silos and channels
- Establishing a collaborative problem resolution process
2. Customer Experience Improvement/Innovation – Creating differentiated experiences at key touchpoints or “moments of truth.”
This means:
- Knowing your customer lifecycle and gaining company-wide commitment
- Identifying key touch points and gaining clarity on co-dependencies and accountability
- Understanding what customers value across the silos and channels
Collaboration is Always Required
For customer experience work to be successful, collaboration is required. As early as possible, engage the operational leaders and matrix organizations who you will be working with. Consensus needs to be agreed upon regarding how the organization will unite the silos.
- Gain agreement that people are ready to work collaboratively on building these competencies.
- Challenge each other about how realistic it will be to move from silo-based approaches to unified company-wide approaches.
- Decide together how you will step your way into these transitioned approaches.
Showing up and proposing that independent work processes are collapsed into one approach is not a successful approach that I’ve seen. So, have the hard conversations now.
Download: Customer Experience Reliability Agreements