Voice of the CCO: Tammy McLeod on How Customer Relationships Further Business Goals
Tammy McLeod, VP & Chief Customer Officer of Arizona Public Service Company (APS) and the Chief Customer Officer Council's 2010 Chief Customer Officer of the Year, gives Curtis N. Bingham, Founder and Executive Director of the Chief Customer Officer Council examples of how customer relationships have helped her further her organization's business goals.
Transcript for Voice of the CCO: Tammy McLeod on How Customer Relationships Further Business Goals
As the executive director of the Chief Customer Officer Council, I've always believed that strong customer relationships form the basis of the only sustainable competitive advantage that companies can hope to maintain especially in today’s hypercompetitive environment.
Tammy McLeod is a member of the Chief Customer Officer Council and the Council’s 2010 Chief Customer Officer of the Year. In a recent conversation, I asked her how her company’s relationship with its customers has helped her to achieve many of the business goals that she's been working on.
Building a relationship with a customer, first of all, basically creates some form of goodwill between our company and our customers; and there are definitely times if you're a fast-growing electric utility when you have to cash in on that goodwill.
One example that comes to mind is the area of line siting where we, actually, because of the increased electrical load and the need inside metropolitan Phoenix, have to have more import capabilities. Because of that, we actually have to physically site power lines, and there's a syndrome out there that's called, “Not in my backyard” Nobody really wants it flowing through their backyard.
But because we've worked closely in those communities and because we have gone through a process to open our doors, educate customers about the needs and about what a particular path would look like that a power line would take, we've met far less resistance than we might, otherwise, have.