2 CCO Priorities: Experience Reliability and Experience Innovation

The best “Chief Customer Officer” or “Customer Experience Officer” is a strong leader inside the organization who is respected for running a good, successful operation, and who has a strong network of relationships across the organization.

Naturally collaborative, they are adept at bringing people together to:
1. Engage the organization to manage customer relationships, revenue, and profit.
2. Create a persistent focus on the customer in decision making and actions.
3. Drive the organization to work together to create unified and optimum experiences.

But the CCO job is not like the others where our score card is clear, where we are in charge of our own deliverables and have a budget and large team connected to our actions.

Embed Two Customer Experience Competencies

Simplifying the work of the Chief Customer Officer or Customer Experience Officer is one of the most important things that should be done early on – to take the mystery and fear out of what this role does.

Simply stated, the work is to embed two new competencies inside the operation:

1. Customer Experience Reliability
Resolving issues creating irregularity and lack of reliability in your experience

2. Customer Experience Improvement/Innovation
Differentiated experiences at key touchpoints or “moments of truth”
As you embark on this work, create clarity about the work ahead, and gain agreement that people are ready to work collaboratively on building these competencies. One of the biggest things I’ve seen CCO’s head straight into is the brick wall of not first getting people’s consensus to work together rather than separately. Consensus needs to be agreed upon regarding how the organization will unite the silos.

Build Repeatable Customer Experiences

Besides a great CCO Job Description, a CCO builds credibility through getting specific and operationally relevant about what they will be enabling and building.

As you frame the work, engage as early as possible the operational leaders and matrix organizations who you will be working with – about the collaboration required for this to be successful.  Challenge each other about how realistic it will be to move from silo based approaches for these competencies to united approaches.  And decide together how you will step your way into these transitioned approaches.  Showing up and proposing that independent work processes are collapsed into one approach is not a successful approach that I’ve seen.  So, have the hard conversations now.

Here are some discussion starter frameworks to use inside your organization, with my compliments.