Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine

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Finding the narratives behind the metrics – being able to review reports and correlate data sets to determine the story behind the numbers to create an accurate picture of the customer behind the scenes. The Chief Customer Officer is typically the highest position in a customer success department and reports directly to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), though this may vary between companies. The CCO is the voice for the CS department and is responsible for uniting C-level executives and the rest of the company on customer-centric values. Some of the main responsibilities of the CCO include: A CCO must make the value statement of the customer experience clear. Establish realistic expectations so stakeholders understand the changes expected. This should also disclose the short-term costs associated with those changes. Now, let's develop a deeper understanding of the objectives of the CCO. What does a Chief Customer Officer do? Solves Customer Problems

Lead the organization’s customer-centric initiatives and support front-line employees to provide exceptional CX. Asda has today announced changes to its senior leadership team including the appointment of a new Chief Customer Officer. The CCO is part of the executive board as the one responsible for implementing and overseeing a customer-first approach throughout the organization. They do this by developing and approving ideas to improve people, processes, and systems that directly affect the customer experience.The whole organization. By putting customer and employee experience front and center, CCOs will help the whole organization flourish. According to the Harvard Business Review, companies that invest in employee experience can be as much as four times more profitable than those that don’t.

Alli Tiscornia, our CCO at ChurnZero, has a comparable take. “A chief customer officer is usually responsible for everything that happens post-sale. They’re responsible for the teams and processes after a prospect becomes a customer.” Customer data analytics to use knowledge of the customer to create strategies on how to build and maintain customer engagement and loyalty. Customer research programmes and analysing the findings to form a 360 view of the customer that the business understands. The CCO is also responsible for creating a comprehensive assessment of the customer and developing more profound insights regarding the customer’s needs, satisfaction, and overall experience. This may include recognizing gaps in customer experience and assessing how to improve customer satisfaction, whether in sales or customer service. However, don't take control and assume your solutions are always correct. CCOs are still a member of a larger C-suite, and every opinion matters.Delivering and demonstrating value to the CEO, the Board, peers, and employees: Because the CCO role is new and some are not yet fully convinced of the value, the CCO must strive to deliver demonstrable value to all stakeholders, not the least of which are the CEO, the Board, and peers. Because results are sometimes harder or take longer to measure, CCOs must be very clear about their performance metrics to allay concerns about performance. As well, CCOs have to proactively collaborate with some executives may feel threatened by the CCO’s broad purview into customer issues that span traditional silos. Starting the movement to customer-centricity was relatively easy; we actually have 28 business units on board," says Isabelle Conner, CCO at General Insurance. Have a strong understanding of the complexity and nuances of different market segments (PLG to Enterprise) and the ability to develop a customer journey lifecycle that is strategically tailored Expert empathy skills with high emotional intelligence, and experience in applying those skills in a business context. Identify gaps or weaknesses in CX across all touchpoints in the customer journey. Whether that’s in customer service or sales, the CCO will be the first to assess how customer satisfaction can be improved.

Although each department should be responsible for this in some aspect, it's beneficial for an organization to have a member of the C-suite own this function. Build a 360-degree view of the customer. The CCO will be the person driving a deeper understanding of customer needs, satisfaction, and their overall experience.An MBA or related graduate or post-graduate degree is often required, with a customer service one being ideal, on top of an undergrad degree in a related field. Customer success courses and certifications are nice-to-have, but experience in the field is much more important and often substitutes traditional education. The Chief Customer Officer is a C-suite position and is responsible for building a customer-centric culture at all levels of a company. In advocating for the customer, the CCO aims to enable an organization to consistently deliver the best possible customer experiences. Mark sees his role at GTR as expanding the commitment to its millions of customers each year to ensure their experiences remain at the heart of the operator’s service and approach. He is passionate about getting it right for the customer, promoting rail for its green credentials and using technology and data to understand customers and make improvements. To become a Chief Customer Officer, you need to do more than satisfy customers. You need to be totally engrossed in understanding how the minds of your target customers work. 2. Learn to collaborate. A CCO often reports into the CEO or Managing Director, although there is not set hierarchy, and this is dependent on the organisational structure of the business. How can I be a good CCO?

Being customer-centric in approach and in practice are both key to being a successful CCO. The era of a customer being satisfied with a solution that solves their problem is past; today, customers require more. Today’s customers, when they interact with brands, want to be delighted and have an exceptional purchasing or customer service experience. Any organization that is able to provide this has the edge over its competitors. As CCO, you have to be truly immersed in the mindset of your customers to deliver exactly what they need, and also maybe things they weren’t sure they needed, but have the end result of delivering an exceptional customer experience. Collaboration The Chief Customer Officer (CCO) role is crucial for virtually every SaaS company. Hiring one moves Customer Success from a function to a company wide-strategy, offering a customer voice in the boardroom and a peer to your sales and product leaders. Yet if you asked 100 SaaS CEOs to define a CCO’s roles and responsibilities, chances are you’d get 200 answers. Since CS has become a lifeline in tech’s current economic state, I wanted to help standardize the CCO position by creating a helpful starting point: a canonical CCO job description. Implementing a customer-centric approach requires resources. That includes staffing, expertise, and buy-in from stakeholders. A CCO is focused on the customer: customer retention, customer service, and building customer relationships. The CCO helps unite the executive team with a customer-centric vision so that all departments work together to support this viewpoint and deliver a consistent experience. A company’s success relies on the success of its customers, so the customer experience should be more than just another project for the COO to manage or another revenue stream for the CRO to consider. Having a CCO in place for the CS team to report to shines a light on the importance of the customer experience and the impact that each customer has on the company as a whole. What is the Salary Range for a Chief Customer Officer?Encourage employees by implementing traditional change management methods, such as goal setting and organizational communication. Engage employees actively to ensure that everyone is on board with the transformation. Obtaining Buy-in From Stakeholders Stepping in to resolve escalated customer support requests and collaborating with service, support, and success teams to ensure memorable and positive customer outcomes regardless of their issues. At that top level, I’m making sure that we are coherent around what we are trying to solve for our customers and what kind of experience we’re trying to provide,” she says.