Exclusive Resources from the CCO Council
Customer crises strike without warning, leaving the unprepared struggling to regain control of the conversation. How can you be ready to meet the challenge? Over my years of experience I’ve found several valuable tools that should be in every chief customer officer’s arsenal; tools that can be quickly adapted to guide an effective response effort no matter what form your crisis takes. In this article, I share four proven practices in customer crisis management.
Experimentation is both the lifeblood and bane of our existence. Through experimentation we have Penicillin and Post-it Notes, but also infomercials. Loyalty and customer centricity are both relatively new concepts. Models, best practices, and effective measures are only just beginning to emerge. Adapting these and creating new ones is one of the most important jobs of customer-facing leaders. Doing so requires experimentation and testing, coupled with close supervision and continuous refinement. This article explains how those of us in the customer care industry can continue to blaze an aggressively innovative path while minimizing negative consequences of such experimentation.
What duties define the position of chief customer officer (CCO)? Members of a Chief Customer Officer Council were charged with delving deeper into the CCO models used across various organizations. This article sets forth a menu of the most common generally accepted accountabilities of today’s chief customer officers. It can be put to practical use today in developing the chief customer officer model that best advances a company’s competitive strategy and long-term success.
How can loyalty executives prove their value and get it right in the first year? This Conversation features a chief customer officer who was successful at doing just that. Appointed as Vendavo’s Chief Customer Officer in 2008 and promoted to SVP of Global Sales in 2012, Jennifer Maul brought twenty years of enterprise software and management experience to the role. Her expertise running the post-sales process of customer relationships made her a natural candidate to transition the company from startup mode to ensuring life-long relationships with customers. We discussed Jennifer’s first year initiatives and accomplishments, and lessons learned in proving the value of the CCO role.
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In this excerpt from my conversation with Jay Topper – Rosetta Stone’s SVP of Customer Success at the time of our interview – we talked about the challenge of achieving balance between cost and customer relationship goals, which are often largely in opposition to each other. Jay’s background as CIO uniquely prepared him to be able to drive the change necessary for the organization to become more relationship-oriented. As the head of what became the largest department in the company, his time was spent bringing the voice of the customer into marketing and product development, while also being responsible for converting leads into sales in Rosetta’s sales call centers and driving renewal and retention.
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There are three types of Authority: Positional Authority granted by virtue of the organizational chart; Borrowed Authority derived as a result of someone above you (e.g., the CEO) championing your cause; and Earned Authority that comes from repeated success in delivering against the goals and objectives of top management. Because Positional Authority is static and Borrowed Authority can sometimes wane, Earned Authority is the most reliable of the three. In this conversation I spoke with Jay Topper – SVP of Customer Success at Rosetta Stone at the time of our interview. Jay was particularly successful in leveraging transparency and peer collaboration to grow his Earned Authority.
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What gives the CCO the ability to excel with peers? The feedback I receive is that besides experience, the real key is the ability to speak the same language. This Conversation features Peter Quinn, CCO for Lawson, a global enterprise software developer that was acquired by Infor in 2011. Peter’s path to the CCO role diverged in multiple directions, but ultimately that diversity of experience is what he says gave him the ability to influence others to action.
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As we continue to look to 1st generation chief customer officers across the country to inform best practices, this Conversation features Peter Quinn, CCO for Infor and a veteran executive in the technology industry. He established the customer experience office for Lawson (now Infor) in 2008, going on to lead as its chief customer officer in 2009. He leads initiatives to enhance customer experience and loyalty and is responsible for building on Lawson’s customer-centric culture. We discussed the opposition he faced during his first year and the strategies he successfully employed to win credibility and collaboration.
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In this third and final excerpt from my interview with Jay Topper, former SVP Customer Success for Rosetta Stone, Jay shares his philosophy of customer engagement and strategies that have had the most impact in driving a relationship-centric culture. In a previous conversation, Jay emphasized that usage is king, and described the delicate balance of cost control relative to increasing product usage. Usage is a broad term that for all intents and purposes, Jay actually sees as engagement. Engaging customers individually, and personally to the extent he can, is what Jay is most passionate about, and what helped him drive his phenomenal success as VP of Customer Success.
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Strengthening customer relationships is a complex mission in the best of times. But when a customer crisis strikes, this charge becomes critical to the organization’s recovery, as damaged customer trust threatens to overthrow the positive connections you’ve built over weeks, months, and years of careful strategy and execution. I recently spoke with one Chief Customer Officer tasked with the difficult mission of rebuilding relationships with customers devastated by terrible tragedy. In this Q&A piece, Helen Burt tells us about her strategies for repairing severely injured customer trust as PG&E sets out on the long road to recovery.
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How can you leverage your customer research to create winning engagement strategies? This Conversation features a chief customer officer who is doing just that. Appointed Chief Customer Officer and Senior Vice President of Pacific Gas & Electric Company in 2006, Helen Burt is a recognized expert in the utility industry and a sought after speaker on customer service, marketing, and quality assurance both nationally and internationally. Here we discuss Helen’s initiatives and lessons learned in driving customer centricity and engagement at one of the nation’s largest utilities.
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Marketers are faced with huge budget cuts, yet across-the-board cuts are clearly more detrimental in the long run than other cost-savings methods. Research has shown that when companies hold the line or even increase their marketing spend during recessions, they achieve significant gains in revenue and market share both during and especially for two to three years following the recession. This article outlines key recommendations from chief customer officers that help shorten the time to success with your innovative programs as you avoid the mistakes of others and experiment in ways that truly, positively enhance customer and company value while enriching the customer experience.
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The emerging role of the chief customer officer (CCO) is defined as: the executive responsible in customer-centric companies for the total relationship with an organization's customers. Today's customer requires access in many forms of media to meet their preferences and lifestyle. A consistent customer experience across all methods of access is required by customers, who often choose to change vendors if they do not get the support they require to meet their expectations. This article covers why consistency and accessibility of the customer experience have become an essential component to winning competition for customers as companies realize the financial benefit of customer satisfaction as its proportionate relationship to loyalty and profitability.
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Customer feedback is a gift-especially from disgruntled customers, because they represent customers that care enough to tell you what they really think rather than being frustratingly neutral in all of your surveys. So, how do you take advantage of it? This article covers three ways to protect your customer and your profits.
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Too often sales people waste a lot of time trying to go where the money is, using cold calling, direct mail, or other standard tactics to reach decision-makers they hope will buy from them. But to be really successful, sales people should instead go where the relationships are by seeking out people who have established relationships with the decision-makers to whom they wish to sell. Through these intermediaries they will ultimately reach the decision makers faster and close significantly more business. In this article, we take a look at how sales people can best go about identifying and leveraging relationships with such trusted advisors and as a result close bigger, better, and easier sales.
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Within the C-Suite, each executive is uniquely accountable to a specific audience and for specific, measurable results. The CEO is accountable for shareholder value, the CFO for financial performance, the CMO for marketing awareness, and the VP of sales for quarterly revenue. In this traditional model – despite every company's claim that it has its customers to thank for its success – there is no accountability for increased customer value. Nobody owns customer relationships, nor does anyone own the task of growing the value of the customer franchise. In the absence of ownership and accountability, it becomes nobody's job.
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The CCO Survival Guide
The CCO role is a lonely place. There are fewer than 500 people in the world with this title, and the average tenure is a mere 26 months. Yet the impact CCOs can have on a company's bottom line can be profound. They address customer centricity in its primary forms – customer satisfaction, customer retention and customer loyalty – and help develop profitable customer strategies that work for your company because they work for your customers. CCOs have mastered the following three key elements of corporate survival...
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As Executive Director for the CCO Council, I am often approached by senior level executives and asked if their company really needs a chief customer officer. Their thought process often revolves around the idea that there are those companies that have a need and require a CCO and those that do not. My answer is often in the form of a correction, as they are asking the wrong question. The right question is "When do you need a CCO?" because hiring a chief customer officer is not an issue of if, but of when.
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Do organizations have a customer conscience? Are there voices within corporate structures today that demand to be heard, insisting that customers' needs be considered at every turn? Is it actually anyone's job to provide balance to the traditional cost cutting and revenue-growth strategies? Though there are a multitude of responsibilities that a chief customer officer or other executive-level customer champion could have, depending upon the organizational goals, growth plans, structure, and market segments, all of the executives we interviewed shared 4 common critical goals. Learn more about these goals in this article.
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