Do You Need a Chief Customer Officer? A 50,000 Foot Assessment

Do you know your company’s reasons for less than great customer performance?

Take Chief Customer Officer Assessment One to pinpoint the challenge you’re facing. This will give you a high level read on how much you might (or might not) need a Chief Customer Officer.

If “Lack of Focus” was a consistent response:

You need to determine if the “customer thing” is a priority with leadership.

• Know the answer to this question: What’s going to elevate the customer work to a priority if it’s not a priority now? Is there bandwidth beyond lip service?
• Hiring a CCO won’t do the trick if lack of focus is a challenge. Naming a strong internal leader to the role will create frustration.
• Bringing in someone from the outside to take on the role will be even more challenging.

If “Disjointed Efforts” was a consistent response:

Bringing in a CCO could work for you.

• You could also choose to have someone take on the CCO role in addition to his or her regular operational role to drive the process for doing the work and drive the discipline in metrics, reporting, and accountability.
• Layering this on to an already busy person who has neither the time nor skill set drives you straight to the “lack of focus” result, however, and it can send the message that the customer work has not yet made it to the status of top priority.

If “Lack of Clarity” was a consistent response:

You could benefit from someone driving consensus for what you want to accomplish.

• I started referring to myself as a “roll of human duct tape” because so much of my time was spent getting people together to agree on the direction, disbanding the group so they could go work, and then bringing them back intermittently to course-correct.
• This could be a dual role for an operations executive, but that person needs to have ample time and leadership commitment to make it worthwhile.