In her Customers are Always weblog, Maria Palma’s Do You Have a Chief Customer Officer? post notes that:
Sears Holdings Corp just hired their first-ever “Chief Customer Officerâ€. John Walden joins the company after spending the last eight years at Best Buy. He will oversee marketing, services, and the company’s direct-commerce business.
I think we’ll begin to see more companies creating this position of chief customer officer within the hierarchy of executive roles. I came across ten questions by Jeanne Bliss, author of Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action, that will help you decide whether or not you are ready to appoint someone to this position.
Here are the questions posed by Ms. Bliss:
1. Is there someone in your company who clarifies what is to be accomplished with customers? Be sure that the CCO or executive leadership does not do this in a vacuum and then try to “throw the brick over the wall” to the leaders for a rubber stamp. That brick will be tossed back so fast you won’t know what hit you.
2. Is there is a clear process to align efforts toward a common goal?
3. Does your company have a roadmap for the customer work? Bring together a team with at least one experienced person from every operational area.
4. Are there clear metrics for measuring progress and ones in which everyone agrees? Too often goals are kept lofty and high, and people aren’t made accountable for their completion. Reward individuals only when a group has accomplished an entire task.
5. Are there clear roles and responsibilities regarding the handoffs between silos?
6. Do people really participate and care about the customer work? Create a formalized team who dedicates 25 to 50% of its time to customer work. To make participation stick, however, requires the commitment of the senior leadership to whom these people report. Form an alliance with the vice presidents of each operating area and get them to agree on what will be done. Let the marching orders to your virtual team come from their direct supervisors. Have the supervisors make it clear they sanction and praise their new role in the customer work. Finally, make participation in the customer work a privilege.
7. Are appropriate resources being allocated to make a real difference to customers? Have an organized annual planning approach that dedicates time to both customer objectives and investment.
8. Is the work considered doable? “Boiling the ocean” is a term people at Microsoft often use to describe seemingly undoable tasks. Our frenzied enthusiasm gets away from us, and we talk about the end “nirvana” state rather than the steps to get there. Don’t abandon strategy. Rather, dole it out in bite-size pieces. Know the end game.
9. Is there a process for the marketing of achievements both internally and to customers? Tell your people what’s going on with customers. No report equals no action. Likewise, tell your customers what you’ve done for them in a letter signed by the president, for example.
10. Is recognition and reward wired to motivate customer work? Know what your customers value most, and tie achievement and recognition to the performance of those specific things. You’ll get people acting differently because they’ll know and understand the targets and what they need to do to reach them.
Now the question comes back to you: Is anyone doing this stuff or even thinking about it? Does anyone have the time to? Don’t just ask these questions, stew over them. Debate them with top leadership and the board. And know that, whatever you decide, driving customer profitability isn’t going to be a walk in the park. The reality: this is at minimum a five-year journey. Pace yourself.
