4. CEOs Should Accelerate CCO Value Right Away

Part of the series, “What the CEO Needs to Do to Ensure Chief Customer Officer Success.” (4 of 8)

Put the Chief Customer Officer in the position of doing specific and tangible work within the first month of the job.

Make the first order of business: driving the metrics of customer loyalty and customer profitability.  This is what I call the customer math for your company. Define your company’s customer math components, the players necessary to comprise them, and how leaders will work with the CCO to incorporate the metrics into the running of the business.

Do this during the first quarter that you have the CCO position in place. This tactical set of actions will accelerate understanding of the CCO role.

People will be able to observe the cross-company action required to identify and connect metrics across the organization. The point can be made that almost all customer issues require this level of synchronization and that it why the CCO position exists.

Another potent first-quarter action for a new CCO is to understand how the company collects and uses incoming customer information. This pushes past the concept of the CCO job, moving involvement into the tactical work of the operation.

Start a trend line on the issues if you don’t have this going in your organization already. The CCO can begin working in partnership with the operating areas to identify the issues.

From there, the CCO can publicly present the top ten issues. Create customer experience reliability, which is one of the things the leadership team can count on in the future from the CCO.

The CCO should continue to partner with the operating areas to get down to the bottom of the issues that are escalating and growing in number. Have the CCO go to the operational areas where the issues exist and understand them. The CCO has to get dirt under his or her fingernails to be able to talk about the business issues. I’ve seen people come back and talk on these issues in strategist-speak, and this doesn’t fly. If done well, this will further remove people’s questions about the validity for the CCO and will move the company early on from talk to action.  This type of tangible kick start will help you gain the momentum you need for the long-term success of the CCO.