Bringing the Customer Forward
What is the purpose of a Chief Customer Officer and why are they more important than ever?
To capture more market share, a company by definition must appeal to and retain more customers. This is not a macro-level challenge, it is a micro-level execution. Simply put, every customer matters. Companies haven’t always been oriented according to this axiom. The most successful companies today have established a Chief Customer Officer (CCO). The role of the CCO is relatively new, but growing in popularity. According to the 2020 Gartner study ,?90% of organizations have a Chief Customer Officer or Chief Experience Officer today.
“There has been significant growth in the presence of CXOs and CCOs or equivalents in many organizations over the last two years,” said?Augie Ray , VP analyst,?Gartner for Marketers . “However, these roles rarely report to CMOs despite marketing taking control of more CX initiatives.”
A CCO is focused on the customer: customer retention, customer service, and building customer relationships. A Chief Customer Officer?oversees an organization's entire relationship with its customers and drives efforts to assess and elevate experiences at each touch point across the customer journey.
The CCO serves alongside the executive board, ideating and designing new programs and systems to improve the customer experience. This occurs in a number of ways ranging from designing customer loyalty programs to incorporating training programs for employees on customer experience. In a modern retail context, the CCO needs to be well versed in digital technology and capable of establishing customer centric business architecture.
The truth is that Customer Centric Business Architecture skills are rare. These require a mix of business domain knowledge, a data discipline to understand the customer in very specific ways, a technology understanding, and an agility to plan and organize when there is a great deal of movement and uncertainty.
Because the CCO thrives at the interaction of people, business process, and technology. This is a full contact endeavor. A CCO must be engaged in day-to-day operations and monitoring the quality of service very directly vs. broadly and abstractly. This requires inputs from a diversity of sources (surveys, journey analytics, market analytics, etc.) and the ability to reassemble inputs into insights that solve a customer’s problem and help customers achieve their goals. ?Indirectly, CCOs are tasked with making jobs easier (especially those that are customer facing) by removing repetitive, complex, unnecessary actions.
What are the Key Skill Sets Required?
These six attributes have been central to my personal success and to many other companies that now have CCOs in place.
1.??????Systems thinking
The era of customers adapting to technology is over. Today’s retail environment requires that technology adapt to customers. We have entered an upload vs. download world:
·????????The workload for systems thinking is persistent and iterative
·????????Standards are needed to ensure companies do not deploy incompatible or non-extensible technology
·????????Use cases need to be built with fusion teams comprised of multi-disciplinary strategists, decision makers, and execution leaders so the technology efforts align to real world solutions
·????????Execution requires a mix of cooperation, co-ownership, and co-creation that needs to be organized and managed
·????????A contemporary customer strategy team must catalog existing technology deployments, catalog expected use cases, and serve as a clearing house for incubation/innovation opportunities
Flexibility and extensibility are today’s most dependable investments. The CCO must be capable of understanding, then make the case for investing in, contemporary technologies that can scale and adapt in a range of business environments. These include cloud strategies, the emergence of M.A.C.H and edge computing, integration through APIs, etc. ?
The team must be willing and empowered to self-cannibalize legacy processes, systems, and business approaches. They must apply chaos engineering practices knowing that downtime, vendor disruptions and industry changes are inevitable. Finally, they must map ways to bring uncertainty under control inside the company in order to reduce risks as industries, costs, and customer behaviors shift.
2.??????Collaboration
When understanding a customer, and executing within a company, a diversity of inputs has never been more important.
·????????Voices of different generations matter a great deal. For example, Millennials expect to have a “representative free” shopping experience and hunt down bargains relentlessly. Baby Boomers prefer help while shopping and have significantly more purchasing power to support this.
·????????Exploring adjacent industries and geographies is also very important to see emerging shopping trends – a.k.a. digital safaris.
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·????????Making sure that practitioners have a seat at the table among the strategists and auditors.
While there are many approaches to collaboration, I have found the most critical baseline is:
A company can cover a great deal of surface area with just these key meetings held regularly.
3.??????Aligning to Value
The CCO must challenge the teams and projects to assess upside risk (missing segments and demand) as well as downside risk (obsolescence and cost) for the company. They must, also, be able to recompose assessments as needed to best exploit changes in context (e.g. COVID, mobile phone use trends, etc.) when they occur.
The new economy requires a pivot from thinking about “running a business” to “improving a business every day.” However, today 50% of proofs of concepts fail to scale . CCOs lead high impact initiatives but concurrently support dozens of legacy and lower-impact initiatives as well. The conflicts that arise during the orchestration of broad initiative management is no simple matter. A CCO must make sure that pilots are well constructed and winning ideas are well supported over various time horizons. Finally, they must manage the emergence of new programs without reducing the economic value generated by existing programs in a company.
4.??????Planning and Prioritization
Many things plague customer facing projects: they take too long to build, they are overly focused on current state, they are naturally oriented into a siloed domain and don’t drive synergies across domains, they are disconnected from fast-paced and changing imperatives. Needs remain undefined and refresh often. ?Keeping a portfolio of customer centric programs aligned and on track, across multiple functions, is central to a CCO role. A company’s success requires a balanced portfolio of “bets”. These include a wide range programs in:
A CCO will build a system to validate thinking, validate results, and ensure programs are moving effectively.
5.??????Map investments
Most companies desire transformation that will accelerate digital sales and generate better marketing efficiency. Likewise, most companies also focus on operational excellence reducing the cost to serve and improving the quality of service. Underlying all of this is the need to finance the best investments and drive to a diversity of expected returns. The CCO must map required investments across:
In all cases, programs need to be value tested and have clear paths to demonstrated value. The metrics guiding these assessments need to be carefully defined and mapped.
6.??????Education
The CCO is a bridge between customer experience, traditional technology disciplines, and traditional demand generation disciplines. They establish how to make transactions seamless for the customer and the retail, merchandising/product, and marketing teams.
Never underestimate (or shortchange) the time and structure required to properly educate and align the stakeholders. Success commands that the CCO brings the people along and help front-line associates act with confidence in front of customers.?
When programs do not launch well (and they won’t every time) the organization much have the discipline to recognize the shortfall and the willingness to retrace steps to reset programs properly.
Conclusion
We are in a golden age for retail. Never before have we had such a wonderful range of solutions, vendors, and technologies to find and service customers. However, customers remain elusive, fickle, and demanding. Shopping has never been easier, but capturing share has never been harder.
The role of the CCO is central to aligning capabilities with the needs of customers. Having the ability to systemically think, collaborate, align with value, orchestrate, map investments needed, and educate the company with allow any CCO to drive durable value to the enterprise.
Vice President of Sales, Operations | Results-Oriented Leader Building High-Impact Teams | MBA | USMC Vet
2 年Great insight Rob! Very much a critical and pivotal role today. Thanks for sharing