CCO Aptitude #1: Revenue = Attention

The work of the Chief Customer Officer is about building the business through the growth of customer profitability and company revenue.

The CCO has got to be able to make and prove this case to gain executive and board support. Know that this is job number one.  In order to connect customer experience to business growth, the CCO has to facilitate this clarity through enabling a movement past the classic quarterly sales goals or production goals or operational objectives as the only metric to define how the business is doing.

Customer growth and profitability metrics must be part of the mix, and connected clearly to customer experience to warrant investment of people, time and financial resources.

Learn How Customers Are Valued and Tracked

To make this case, I suggest that CCOs first spend the time to understand the different accounting methods throughout the company to learn how and if customers are valued, tracked, and accounted for. This will likely be disjointed and will take real effort to tease out the information from throughout the organization.

Establish a partnership with finance to cobble together the customer accounting approaches and establish a system for tracking customers and the cost to serve them. The company has to move past the classic quarterly sales goals or production goals or operational objectives as the only metric to define how the business is doing.

The successful CCO makes job one a partnership across the operating leaders and CFO to accomplish these four things:
1. Establish a united approach for valuing customers
2. Creating an understanding and value of how profitability grows through organic customer growth
3. Aligning the silos to do the math on customer profitability – profitability and revenue growth or loss due to growing or shrinking the customer asset
4. Identifying the points in the customer lifecycle that grow or shrink customer profitability