Marketing Smarts: Is your company committed to customer experience? [Podcast]

It was my pleasure to appear on the MarketingSmarts podcast episode that debuted last Wednesday. You can listen to it here:

I was interviewed by the great Kerry O’Shea Gorgone. We talked about several key topics, including:

• The rise of the chief customer officer
• Why every company should strive to implement customer-centric leadership
• Adopting and holding to customer-centric practices
• How to still value customers in times of economic/business downturns

The Need For Customer-Centric Leaders

One of my favorite parts of the conversation comes around the 7:30 mark, as we discuss the need for customer-centric leaders. I noted:

“There is a very strong understood connection between organic growth and growing your customer base and profitability—that it can’t be all about your sales acquisition engine. That’s good, but if you’re leaking 90% of what you brought in the quarter before, out of your existing customer base, you could have grown but you don’t. There’s got to be something pointing to it, and usually it’s the experience. As a result, CEOs have realized that after all these years…saying ‘go be customer-focused’—it doesn’t happen organically. The silos don’t organically decide to put aside some of their own silo-based metrics and unite to deliver an experience. You need somebody sitting at the center of it, at least for a while, orchestrating it.”

The Chief Customer Officer Human Duct Tape Show

It’s been particularly exciting to appear on podcasts recently because — drum-roll please — we’re launching our own at Customer Bliss in May!

The “Chief Customer Officer Human Duct Tape Show” will interview top CCOs and other customer-focused executives to discuss the imperatives of customer-focused leadership and culture.

We’ll get into the challenges and the successes — and address the why (the need for building these processes), the how (to actually do it), and the who (to involve). It’s going to be fun and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

 

Update

Excited to announce that we launched the podcast in April 2016!