The Future of Chief Customer Officer

Would You Make a Good Chief Customer Officer?

According to Forrester's study, fewer than 10% of executives responsible for Customer Experience have a background in the field. That is because customer experience is a relatively young?business practice with few executive-level leaders. This works well when they choose candidates with two distinguishing characteristics:

1- The first attribute is a strong personal brand. According to Forrester, one-third of chief customer officers previously served as division presidents or general managers. Almost as many had senior leadership experience in marketing, operations, sales, or service, this allows them to talk authoritatively to the people they are?trying?to influence.

2- The second distinguishing feature is their unwavering conviction that focusing on customers leads to excellent company success. That motivates them to put customer experience front and center as a business discipline on par with sales, marketing, or technology. When you reveal a senior leader with a strong personal brand who understands the business value of customer experience, you've found a CCO candidate.

The Future of Chief Customer Officer

When it happens for you is determined by both the maturity of your company's Customer Experience and your industry. In other words, the future will continue to be unevenly distributed. The first thing you can bet on is that the number of chief customer officers will continue to increase, and the rate of growth will accelerate.

Some of this growth will come from people doing the thing we just discussed?you not to do: appointing a CCO just because it's fashionable. That is a mistake you can help avoid at your company, and it is critical that you do it. Companies that make this error will experience high-profile chief customer officer failures. These failings will result in a brief backlash against the CCO position. The reaction will subside in a year or two at most for firms in general?but will hold back customer experience initiatives by several years at enterprises where a chief customer officer imploded

The majority of the increase in the number of CCOs will be due to a shift in market dynamics as we enter?the age of the?customer day by day, commoditization, new sorts of competitors, and empowered customers. To compete in that world, businesses will need to boost their customer experience game.

Smart organizations will recognize that selecting a CCO with the correct preconditions for success will be like putting jet fuel into their car's gas tank for competitive advantage. Remember not to buy the backlash any more than you buy?the hype, unless you believe that customers will ever become irrelevant to the success of your company. In terms of growth, industries will select CCOs when competitive disruption hits them hard enough to cause damage. For example, health insurance firms are appointing CCOs as more competition enters the health insurance markets.

As a result of these changes, we will begin to see more professional chief customer officers—executives who move from one CCO position to another. Although there aren't many of them currently, we're already seeing some professional CCOs out there.

Where will this end?

Not every firm has a chief marketing officer, nor will every company have a chief customer officer. However, just as many organizations today lack a marketing director, it will be difficult to find a company without a Customer Experience director in the future.

That will result in a much larger talent pool and more competition among top customer experience professionals for CCO positions, particularly across industries. It will also increase the number of persons interested in working in customer experience. and that more CEOs without a background in customer experience would seek to take on the role of CCO to boost their marketability.

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