Chief Customer Officer – What You Should Be Evaluated On In Year One

The person who takes on the Chief Customer Officer role should have some straight conversations about how he or she will be rated in this new work because there won’t necessarily be tangible by-products immediately. There needs to be explicit agreement that credit will be given for moving the company along the difficult path to acknowledging and aligning for change besides just measuring the change itself.

Here is a simple path to rate performance against in the first year when the work and its outcomes may appear the vaguest:

1. Acknowledgment that there’s a problem (this in itself can take months)

2. Agreement on the issues

3. Alignment on how to proceed

4. Commitment to resources

5. Beginning the process and driving company participation

6. Installation of accountability process

7. Guerrilla metrics in place

8. First results accomplished and reported

Getting this agreement is critical to ensuring that there is a real understanding of what can be accomplished in the first year with all its “get-ready” and alignment issues. Once that first year is over and you’ve gained momentum, it will be much simpler to define success metrics.