Curtis on...Critical Success Factors for CCOs: 6. Tying Compensation to Customer Centricity
In this sixth of seven videos on critical success factors for chief customer officers and senior loyalty executives, Curtis Bingham, Founder and Executive Director of the Chief Customer Officer Council advises tying compensation directly to customer centricity objectives in order to cement their priority within the organization.
Transcript for Curtis on...Critical Success Factors for CCOs: 6. Tying Compensation to Customer Centricity
The sixth critical success factor for chief customer officers and loyalty executives is that of tying executive compensation to measures of customer centricity. Compensation has always and forever been the sticky wicket. It's one that everybody is interested in, and everybody is very loath to change.
Compensation mostly drives behavior. In some cases, it forms a tiebreaker between two good ideas or two good directions. What oftentimes happens is that a customer issue is raised to the forefront and everybody says, “Yes, we'll fix this; we'll address this.” But at the end of the day when they look at what their priorities are, they will choose those priorities upon which they're compensated. So, having compensation in every executive’s MBO makes sure that the customer issues never get lost.
Compensation in the MBO of many of the executives needs to be something relatively simple. It can be something as simple as customer acquisition, customer retention, customer churn, or a loyalty measure like NPS or CLI, whatever the increase is in that loyalty measure. Whatever is a leading indicator for the desired customer behavior is a good metric to be included in everyone’s compensation plan.
If you're the CEO, make sure that everyone is on board and everyone is properly aligned by including some measures of customer centricity in the MBO process.
If you're a loyalty executive or a chief customer officer, make sure that everyone is on your side. You don't need to constantly fight the priority battles. Propose that everybody be measured by some sort of customer centricity metric because, after all, it's all about the customers. Find the metric that all of the executives can agree upon.