Voice of the CCO: Jeb Dasteel on CCO Council Membership
Jeb Dasteel, SVP & Chief Customer Officer of Oracle and the Chief Customer Officer Council's 2009 Chief Customer Officer of the Year, highlights three benefits to becoming a Council member.
Transcript for Voice of the CCO: Jeb Dasteel on CCO Council Membership
What I've really gotten out of being part of the Council since then and, particularly, after this last year, is a sense of affiliation with the community of people who have like interests, like objectives, and like jobs; and I think that's been very effective; and that goes to the earlier point about what Toni does, what Toni has experienced, what her objectives and challenges are, and the high degree of commonality there is between what she does in the business that could not be different than what Oracle does and the kinds of challenges that my team and I face every day.
So, that aspect of affiliation, I think, has been a real and a huge benefit to me, personally, and to us.
Secondly, in terms of authority, having the title and the recognition for Oracle has been very useful. It's not that we've been able to do wildly new things that we couldn't have done in the previous five years that we've been developing and rolling out customer programs. It's really more about the ability to get things done faster, more completely and with a level of authority that we just didn't have and that I just didn't have before. So, that's been very helpful from the inside out looking within the organization and what can be done within Oracle, in my case.
The third aspect is credibility. Credibility has been very helpful in terms of talking to customers. It's opened up avenues. I probably spend, personally, manyfold times more with customers. A significant amount of my day now is filled in working with customers; and that wasn’t necessarily the case before; and I attribute that really largely to having a new level of credibility that has really enabled me to have conversations at an executive level with the customer that, frankly, I just couldn't have had before.
I think that covers it. It's been a pretty interesting journey for us if I look all the way back through seven years in terms of how we've been trying to drive customer centricity or customer focus at Oracle and implement different programs and experiment with what looks well and what we found, in some cases, didn't work so well.
But in the last couple of years in working with the Council and being the Chief Customer Officer of the Year for 2009, I think that's taken us to yet another level in terms of that kind of interaction with customers, the quality of those interactions, and just getting stuff done at Oracle. It's been pretty significant for us.