Chief Customer Officer : Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action

by Jeanne Bliss

Drawing on her first-hand experience at top companies as diverse as Lands’ End and Microsoft, Jeanne Bliss explains why even great corporations can drift to delivering mediocrity to customers, and she offers a proven solution to break the cycle. Different divisions and departments in corporations can fail to communicate and act as a team—they create silos instead of a superior customer experience. Jeanne Bliss shows in stark detail how profits suffer when businesses focus on their organizational charts and not their customer relationships. This book provides leaders the tools and information they need to overcome organizational inertia and deliver a meaningful customer experience. The author includes diagnostics to determine if a company’s core strengths, metrics, and systems improve or harm customer relationships. With all these tools, leaders can address the organizational challenges they face with an exhaustive review of the Chief Customer Officer role and an evaluation to determine the right solution for their culture and company.

Genres: Business

320 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2006

Reviews

[Manohar_shresthahotmail.com]

What this book is about?
The CEO is responsible towards the overall organization. The CFO is responsible towards the finances, as the title indicates; the COO, towards operation; the CMO, towards the marketing; the COO, towards the operations.

But who is responsible for the customer?

This book advocates the creation of the role of Chief Customer Officer or CCO who is responsible for customer satisfaction. For example when a new product is launched:
- the CEO will advocate for or against it in terms of its effect on the company’s overall objectives
- the CFO, in terms of the effects on the financials
- the CMO, in terms of the strain on marketing
- the COO, in terms of effects on operations and HR

Now the CCO, will advocate for or against it in terms of customer experience.

According to the author, as early as 2005, various organizations in the USA, already have a position of CCO. Their job description or JD is mainly:
- to design metric systems to measure customer service levels
- to monitor, analyse those metrics
- to investigate causes of lapses
- to champion solutions for customers to get best customer service
- to be answerable for any customer complaints

Bliss argues that it is not necessary for all organizations to have a CCO but she advises us to use this framework to find out whether this position is needed or not:

Most organization can categorized into 2 broad categories:
1 product-based power core: production, development, innovation, and manufacturing operations
2 marketing-based power core: campaigns, tactics and branding.

Further within each broad categories they are further divided into 3 sub categories:
1 sales based power core
2 technology based power core
3 customers based power core

Obviously if your organization is falls under ‘customers based power core’ be in either production or marketing based, a CCO is highly advised.

Why?

The people within the existing structure who can solve the problem related to customer experience that come up aren’t motivated enough. The problem isn’t well-defined enough. A solution is too difficult to implement for them without a leader, a chief customer officer to lead them.

When companies don’t work together, or people are rewarded for doing their own thing instead of the customer’s best interest, they can create problems. For example, one company sent a customer an empty box because it was trying to fulfill the order as fast as possible. The shipping department got a reward for fulfilling orders quickly without regard to what the customer needed. This reveals that businesses tend to focus on keeping operations running smoothly and producing products rather than pleasing customers.

So this is where a CCO is needed.

Again economics apply here. If the ROI on the salary of the CCO cannot be in the scale of lets say 1 % improvement customer satisfaction being equivalent to significant revenue or profit growth, then this responsibility may best be fulfilled by the CEO or COO or CMO.



How is it useful to you in your :
Life
x

Business
This book is very important for CEO’s of large organizations like banks, and congloremates or any with large number of staffs. This implies proportionately large number of ways that things can go wrong in the process of trying to satisfy customers.

This is a new concept in Nepal, but one that you must think of seriously.

Did you know Jeff Bezos has an empty chair in all of the meetings with his team? Who is that empty chair for? On it is written on a placard, Mr/Ms Customer. Yes in all his meetings Jeff wants the customers to be represented. It is obvious but many of us leaders are mixed up in legality, operations, strategy at most HR. We don’t have the mental energy to focus on more things like customer’s point of view. So far it was difficult or impossible to measure customer satisfaction like we measure sales, profits or quality. But technology and knowledge have come a far way by 2022. Now we can quantify, monitor, regulate and manager customer satisfaction.

Don’t you think it is a wise decision to invest in customer satisfaction directly?

Careers
x

Conclusion

This week was a hard one in that I didn’t get a wow feedback on one of my trainings, which I am so accustomed to. Even after 10,000+ sessions I realize there are still few mistakes I could make that I was not aware of and in this case that I made.

So after the initial shock, I quickly accepted my mistake and found the learning I was supposed to get. So far so good, but my business of training is somehow like the showbiz. The last flop movie affects your next movies. No professional goes into his job, thinking he will screw up, but bad things happen to good people. That is life, or in french: c’est la vie.

Also this shock helped me find the answer about my next business strategies that I had been unable to get since several months. What is the answer?

I had 3 strategic focus options:
1 work in one single organization at a time as a management consultant / trainer for next 10 years until i am 60 years old

2 work in multiple organizations within the same sector as a management consultant / trainer for next 10 years until i am 60 years old


3 work in multiple organizations in multiple sectors as a management consultant / trainer for next 10 years until i am 60 years old


So just to give you closure I will tell you the answer that I got from the transformation of the above shock:


Strategic focus option no.3

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was in an idealistic state of mind when I picked this up. I really wanted to change my companies viewpoint of Customer Support. I read this and ran into a brick wall at work.

I like the idea behind it, and I agree, I just wish I tried harder.

[Gin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very throughout book about what is cco and it’s role in company. Do you need one? What you need to do the customer centric? If you are CCO then there is plenty of advice on how to even choose a company and CEO and how to make them believe that this position is necessary. Great proffession book.

[Krista Rick’s · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did not finish, it was okay.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

READ NOV 2013

Nice piece on how to transition to a customer-centric organization.

[Theodore Kinni · Rating 3 out of 5]

A leading practitioner's view of what it really takes to build an organization's customer focus.