CMO & CCO Experience Leadership

The strategic value of Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Customer Officers extends far beyond revenue growth. Senior executives may try to combine these roles into one, but each has a distinctively strategic emphasis.

Marketing is clearly aimed at defining value propositions and generating awareness and sales leads. In doing so, Marketing is instrumental in **setting customers' expectations**.

The aim of Customer Experience may be less clear in many firms, but ideally, it is symbiotic with Marketing: **ensuring that customers' expectations are met or exceeded**.

CMOs set expectations for customer acquisition and CCOs assure expectations are delivered for customer retention.

Although this is a simplification of reality, everyone benefits from this internal positioning:

1. Because customer experience is the cumulative series of realities felt by customers in relation to their expectations. CX = Realities divided by Expectations.
2. Customers return and refer based on this equation.
3. Costs to serve (including churn) are determined by this equation.

Enormous potential exists in the customer insights acquired by Marketing and Customer Experience teams. CX insights are most valuable when they foster a lifetime value mindset.

A lifetime value mindset emphasizes relationship strength. At its heart is TRUST.

Trust between customers and your brand reduces costs. It's the basis for magnetic appeal to both existing and potential customers. It's shaped by internal trust between your brand and your employees. It's influenced by trust between your brand and partners of all kinds.

Accordingly, a lifetime value mindset should be applied to all of your strategies, programs, and interactions with fellow employees and with partners and customers.

CMOs and CCOs can influence lifetime value mindset and trust among everyone in your ecosystem (universally for brands, non-profits, and governments). When non-customer-facing groups make daily decisions based on goals for lifetime value and trust, your culture becomes more preventive, respectful, accountable, efficient, and growth-oriented.

Influencing lifetime value through widespread use of experience insights may be the highest strategic value of CMOs and CCOs:

1. This aligns your enterprise with customers.
2. Company-wide alignment to your core-growth customers' needs is the surest way to maintain and expand high-growth market share.
3. Alignment is absence of gaps: preventing gaps between expectations and realities, as seen by customers, saves costs of all kinds.

Company-wide alignment to CX, EX and PX expectations is Experience Leadership.

How can CMOs and CCOs cross-pollinate their strategic value? Stay tuned for the next issues of this newsletter to discover things you can begin doing this quarter.

Related articles:

1. Customer Experience + Marketing: Pro's and Con's
2. CX Index: Cracking the Code in Customer Experience Strategy
3. Customer-Centric Marketing: Align for Growth
4. 5 Best Experience Management Metrics

Author?Lynn Hunsaker?is Chief Customer Officer at ClearAction Continuum, where she co-created the?Experience Value Exchange?as a game-changer for CX, CS, EX, PX and Marketing teams' strategic impact. You're welcome to join the Value Exchange today!

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