Curtis on…CCO Essentials: Four Key Reasons to Hire a Chief Customer Officer
Curtis N. Bingham, Founder and Executive Director of the Chief Customer Officer Council, highlights the three key reasons why companies hire a chief customer officer, as well as a fourth reason they should consider.
Transcript for Curtis on…CCO Essentials: Four Key Reasons to Hire a Chief Customer Officer
Over the past near decade, I've had a chance to work with over a hundred and fifty chief customer officers. As I've examined the reasons why they've been hired, there are three key reasons that bubble up to the surface, and there should be a fourth. Let's talk about those.
The first key reason why a chief customer officer is hired is because there is some sort of chronic customer crisis that, despite the company’s best efforts and despite throwing huge numbers of people and large dollars at them, they can't make these chronic customer crises go away.
So, the chief customer officer is brought in to marshal the resources, to champion the customer cause, do the root cause analysis – whatever it is – but coordinate the efforts to make these chronic customer crises go away.
The next key reason why a chief customer officer is hired is to protect and retain existing customers. As a company begins to grow, they begin to realize that they're losing quite a number of customers out the back door—sometimes, more than they might be bringing in the front door.
So, a chief customer officer is brought in to protect and retain these existing customers. There is plenty of focus on acquiring new, but they need to bring in someone who can focus on the retention aspect of the total customer base.
The third reason is to create sustainable competitive advantage. So often, small companies are faced with the challenge of competing with an 800-pound gorilla. They know that they can't necessarily do it on product alone so they begin to compete on service and on experience.
So, they hire a chief customer officer, bring them to the customer visits, and say, “Look, we value you, your business, and your success so highly that we have appointed an executive to make sure that your needs are met.”
Those are the three primary reasons why chief customer officers are hired.
There's a fourth, and we should really be spending a lot more time trying to hire chief customer officers to achieve this goal, and that is to better acquire more profitable customers.
If you think about the definition of a chief customer officer, they are the ultimate authority on customers. They should know better than anyone else which customers are the most profitable and what triggers their purchase behavior, and then work with marketing and sales in order to bring more profitable customers into the prospect list, into the sales funnel, and into the company.
Regardless of the reason for the hire, the CCO role is rapidly moving from obscurity to mainstream and is becoming a powerful force in business growth.