The CCO’s Checklist: 28 Actions to Take for Customer-Driven Growth

Earlier this year, Forrester released its report, The US Customer Experience Index, 2019. Forrester Chief Research Officer Carrie Johnson said, of these findings, “How an experience makes customers feel has a bigger influence on their brand loyalty than any other factor.”

And yet, this report found that while 14% of brand scores rose, 5% of scores declined and an incredible 81% stagnated. As increased emphasis falls on customer experience to impact loyalty, customer experience executives (CCOs, CXOs) must take a leadership role in driving company culture through actions that improve CX—in order to achieve customer-driven growth.

Now, more than ever, the 5 competencies that I introduced in my best-selling book, Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine must be revisited as the foundation of our work. 

As a Chief Customer Officer (or Customer Experience Executive), you must work with the board, the C-Suite, and across the organization to embed behaviors and actions that unite silo-based organizations in focusing on priorities in customers’ lives. This manner of doing business honors employees and customers, resulting in a sustainable, repeatable and deliberate one-company approach to growth. 

Here’s a checklist of 28 actions that you can refer to within the 5 competencies, to help you bring your teams together and lead them to success.

Honor and Manage Customers as Assets of the Business

☑ Enable and inspire decision-making driven by honoring customers as assets.

☑ Elevate customer growth/loss as a success metric of the business.

☑ Build one-company definitions of customer segments, customers to invest in.

☑ Establish behavioral indicators of growth or loss of relationship.

☑ Unite leadership in customer-asset growth definition and communication.

Align Around Experience: Unite the Organization to Deliver Valued Customer Experiences

☑ Lead one-company prioritization of investment on high-impact experiences.

☑ Establish one-company journey maps and identification of priority experiences.

☑ Create a common language set and definitions for the customer experience.

☑ Unite the organization of the evaluation of experience reliability performance.

☑ Help leaders deliver united communication and focus on experiences.

Build a Customer Listening Path: Establish Active Customer Listening and Understanding 

☑ Be the storyteller of customers’ lives.

☑ Define what customers value and understand evolving needs.

☑ United aided and unaided feedback, such as surveys to tell a one-company customer story.

☑ Align multiple sources of customer feedback to the customer journey.

☑ Create a united platform for understanding customers’ lives & focused action.

Be Proactive About Experience Reliability and Innovation

☑ Embed skills to understand and improve priority experiences.

☑ Build a customer experience development process to enable cross-company teams to improve unreliable and innovation opportunity experiences.

☑ Teach teams to build reliability metrics for priority experiences.

☑ Elevate priority process metrics in critical experiences to earn C-suite focus.

☑ Manage priority experience processes proactively to earn customer growth.

☑ Identify and focus on customer behavior movement as a result of priority experiences to establish connection and ROI to customer-driven growth.

One-Company Leadership, Accountability, and Decisions

☑ Unite leaders in focusing the organization on improving customers’ lives.

☑ Engage leaders personally in the build-out of the competencies.

☑ Unite leadership communication and messaging.

☑ Enable employees to deliver value. Get rid of stupid rules and barriers.

☑ Establish experiential learning for walking in the customers’ shoes.

☑ Drive rigorous communication and engagement.

☑ Unite leaders in building a lens for decision-making that begins with growing customers as assets.

Here are 28 actions that every #CCO can take to lead their organization to customer-driven success. #customerexperience #leadership Share on X

If you want to learn more about the specific role of the Chief Customer Officer, along with specific tactics to implement in your organization, might I suggest a copy of Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine? You’ll find checklists like this, and more resources to guide you along your journey.