Читать книгу Chief Customer Officer 2.0 - Jeanne Bliss - Страница 7

A Chief Customer Officer is successful when he or she can simplify how the organization works together to achieve customer-driven growth, engage the leadership team, and connect the work to a return on investment. That's what everyone wants to know about this role. What does the Chief Customer Officer do, how is the work staged and what is its impact? You'll find the answers to these questions in this book.

What you will also find, which is equally important, is how to unite the leadership team and organization to ‘earn the right’ to growth by making decisions and orienting business operations to improve customers' lives. This is the elusive and challenging element of this work that, when neglected, can turn it into a program or project rather than a transformation. Sustainable change will occur only when this work goes beyond project plans and status updates and is grounded in caring about customers' lives. It's the path to growth the five competencies outlined in this book provides.

What I know from over thirty years as a CCO practitioner and coach to customer leadership executives and their C-Suite, is that we've got to take the reactive nature out of this work. Our work must be about embedding behaviors and competencies in the organization: Competencies that will transform how the business and operation are run, to achieve customer-driven growth.

If you became the customer “Velcro man” or “Velcro woman” where all customer issues were strewn in your path upon assuming this role, you know that establishing role clarity and executive alignment is paramount. Without it, you run the risk of being defined as the fix-it person. And that's not who you want to be.

Customer-focused efforts are often highly reactive because they sync to the cycle of survey results. The results come out; the silos react independently, rinse and repeat. This reactive nature of waiting for the results and then taking actions that chase the score push the work to what I call “whack-a mole” tactics. Fixing things. Project plans or work streams with red, yellow, and green dots.

And the role of the chief customer officer (CCO) is defined as the fix-it person for what currently ails customers, or the one nagging the silos to take action. Despite all this activity (giving a false positive of commitment measured by energy expended), we have not embedded new behaviors for how we understand customers' lives, how we care about their lives, and how we improve their lives. Our work is defined by project plan movement rather than customer life improvement.

The purpose of our work is to galvanize the organization to deliver experiences that customers want to have again – to earn the right to customer-driven growth. But what we sometimes do in these roles is the opposite. Customer-focused actions are one-off reactions to survey results, or to an executive in the field getting direct customer feedback, or to a letter that lands on someone's desk. Information is delivered, the silos react, and the cycle repeats.

As a result, the higher purpose of our work, which is to drive growth, is lost. These efforts then fall prey to being perceived as costs without reward. CEOs and boards want to be customer focused, but without an explicit connection to growth, many consider the work to be:

● A leap of faith.

● Expensive.

● Deterrents to the “real” work.