How a CCO Thrives During CX Transformation

The Chief Customer Officer role will evolve as you progress through the phases of the Customer Experience Maturity Map.

Years one through three are the disruption, blocking and tackling years.  Employees know how to achieve results within their silo walls. Embedding competencies into the organization will disrupt their deeply rooted silo-based operations, their definitions and metrics for success and organizational habits.

My goal is to help you build or rebuild traction as quickly and effectively as possible. The difference between burning out and thriving as a CCO comes down to:

• Driving growth
• Achieving clarity for your role and leadership’s required involvement
• Knowing the corporate sandbox you’re involved in transforming

Attitude Shift Required for CX Transformation

The shifts in your leadership’s thinking and behavior will determine how well the five competencies can be embedded to transform your business. Successful Chief Customer Officers need to deliberately build a plan of action in the early years.

The plan includes:

• Uniting leadership actions and behavior
• Advancing from silo-based to one-company focus
• Embedding actions or competencies to achieve greater results
• Enabling employee performance

As the leadership team works together, three common categories of behavior are necessary to build out the five competencies. Think of them as the change management building blocks required to customer life improvement. These categories comprise the ‘prove it to me’ behavior common in CX transformation.

Unite the leadership team

The leadership team must support and enable customer asset growth with consistency and commitment. These are the critical tasks for leadership during CX transformation:

• Deliver united messaging that focuses on  customer asset growth
• Agree and gain alignment on the customer journey
• Commit to a united one-company listening path
• Require operational performance that earns customer growth
• Build a customer room to tell the story of customers’ lives

Give Permission & Behaviors to Model

Organizational dynamics and communication are extremely necessary.  This is where you address the human issues critical to building the customer growth engine.

• Enable employees to grow the customer asset
• Drive accountability and performance by customer experience stage
• Enable cross-silo experience understanding and action
• Commit resources to customer experience development (CXD)
• Use the customer room to establish regular accountability
• Practice intelligent capacity creation and unite priorities

Prove it with Actions

Commitment to customer driven growth is proven with choices and action. The leadership team must be united on how they determine investments and prioritize actions. As decisions are made, you must actively provide the organization with clear examples so they can model them.

• Put the voice of the customer in your leadership’s ear
• Reward employees for customer asset growth
• Enable employees to make decisions guided by leadership’s “code of conduct” by defining (stage by stage) what you must always do and never do
• Practice active and “experiential” listening walk in the customers’ shoes)
• Stop reactive one-off projects and fire drills started from anecdotal or incomplete, silo based information.
• Give the customer experience development (CXD) process the time and resources necessary for it to become a competency of the business
• Reward cross-silo collaboration
• Market hope

Conclusion

The role of the Chief Customer Officer is to work with leaders to provide proof that they are committed to CX transformation and  improving customers’ lives. You must move beyond the customer manifesto and translate commitment into actions that employees will feel proud to follow.

“One Company” leadership puts into practice the behaviors required by a united leadership team to enable customer asset growth.  They give employees direction on what to model, decisions that are made and actions that are taken that show that the customer commitment is real and not lip service.

To emulate culture, employees need examples and proof.