Customer Experience Management: The Role of a Chief Customer Officer

If you fol­low cus­tomer ser­vice news or read blogs and print pub­li­ca­tions ded­i­cated to cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment, you may have noticed a new trend. Cor­po­rate Amer­ica cares about the cus­tomer! That’s right! Not only are com­pa­nies invest­ing in new ser­vice and sup­port chan­nels and cus­tomer ser­vice skills train­ing for employ­ees, they are also hir­ing new upper man­age­ment: Chief Cus­tomer Offi­cers (CCO).

Suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies know that they must allo­cate funds for the devel­op­ment of new prod­ucts and ser­vices, and employee skills devel­op­ment train­ing. Suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies also know the impor­tance of invest­ing time and money into cre­at­ing pos­i­tive cus­tomer expe­ri­ences. For­rester Research has been track­ing the rise of the CCO and has noted a sig­nif­i­cant increase in the num­ber of com­pa­nies with a sin­gle exec­u­tive cham­pi­oning cus­tomer expe­ri­ence efforts.

A Chief Cus­tomer Offi­cer rep­re­sents the cus­tomer in the board­room and actively man­ages cus­tomer engage­ment poli­cies and pro­ce­dures across the orga­ni­za­tion. CCO’s embrace cus­tomer advo­cacy and strive to strengthen cus­tomers’ emo­tional con­nec­tions to the brand using tar­geted ad cam­paigns and new ser­vice chan­nels. The key role of a Chief Cus­tomer Offi­cer is to learn what cus­tomers value about the com­pany and how cus­tomers feel about the level of ser­vice cur­rently being pro­vided. A Chief Cus­tomer Offi­cer then takes that data and exe­cutes change to close the gap between cus­tomer expec­ta­tions and actual experiences.

Chief Cus­tomer Offi­cers have the abil­ity to form multi-channel, multi-department teams to closely mon­i­tor and proac­tively adjust poli­cies and pro­ce­dures to max­i­mize cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion. When customer-centricity is pro­moted from the top down, an orga­ni­za­tion will see rapid adop­tion across all man­age­ment lev­els and a result­ing increase in brand advocacy.

86% of con­sumers quit doing busi­ness with a com­pany because of a bad cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, up from 59% 4 years ago. Source: Har­ris Inter­ac­tive, Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Impact Report

Most com­pa­nies have been mon­i­tor­ing cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion, but not many have been act­ing on the results. To effec­tively increase cus­tomer loy­alty and the result­ing rev­enue – orga­ni­za­tions must employ an exec­u­tive who can quickly iden­tify unmet cus­tomer needs, rec­tify sat­is­fac­tion issues regard­ing pol­icy and pro­ce­dure, and most impor­tantly, man­age the cus­tomer experience.