The CCO – the Voice of the Customer
The customer is speaking but are companies listening? Whether you like it or not the market is listening as social media has enabled the customer to publicize their experience with your brand across platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and more. Where previously making product comparisons meant traveling from store to store, it is now done in a single click of button and few visits to industry bloggers. Your brand is one display and there is nowhere to hide.
To be successful in this ultra-connected world companies must infuse the voice of the customer into the ethos of their culture. Companies who do this well will have a distinct advantage over competitors who are tone deaf to the chorus of their clients.
About The Gurus
SHEP HYKEN is a customer experience expert and the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations. He is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and has been inducted into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement in the speaking profession. Shep works with companies and organizations who want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees. His articles have been read in hundreds of publications, and he is the author of Moments of Magic®, The Loyal Customer, The Cult of the Customer, The Amazement Revolution and Amaze Every Customer Every Time. He is also the creator of The Customer Focus™ program, which helps clients develop a customer service culture and loyalty mindset.
JEANNE BLISS, Founder of CustomerBliss and the Co-Founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. She is a Consultant and Thought Leader as she is one of the pioneers of the Chief Customer Officer role. She is also the author of the new book called Chief Customer Officer 2.0. Jeanne is a global leader in her field.
Jeanne Bliss pioneered the role of the Chief Customer Officer, holding the first ever CCO role at Lands’ End, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker and Allstate Corporations. Reporting to each company’s CEO, she moved the customer to the strategic agenda, redirecting priorities to create transformational changes to each brands’ customer experience. She has driven achievement of 95 percent loyalty rates, improving customer experiences across 50,000-person organizations.
JOHN PATTERSON is a sought after speaker and consultant on the topics of creating consistently great customer experiences that drive customer loyalty and growing business by creating, leading and sustaining extraordinary service.
He is the co-author of three books with Chip Bell including the award winning international best seller “Wired and Dangerous; How Your Customers Have Changed and What To Do About It”. John has appeared live on ABC and Fox Business. He speaks regularly on the “The Small Business Advocate Show” with Jim Blasingame. His articles have appeared in numerous publications including Leadership Excellence and Customer Relationship Management magazine. John holds a graduate degree in business from the Darden School at the University of Virginia as well as a B.S. in Business Administration from The Citadel.
His consulting practice specializes in helping organizations effectively implement and manage the complex culture change required for service innovation and effectively delivering great customer experiences that drive loyalty, advocacy and growth.
To find out what companies can do to ensure the Voice of the Customers echoes through all departments of your company we asked the Customer Service Gurus, and this is what they had to say:
SHEP HYKEN
The first step in ensuring the voice of the customer is heard is having a feedback mechanism to capture customer feedback and it is the CCOs responsibility to ensure that the information is sent to the right departments and effectively utilized. I think one of the best at this is American Express, that is the US company they do a great job that when they are finished their “members” are happy. Enterprise Rent a Car is also phenomenal at doing this and you can see the impact of a customer focused culture when they acquired National Car Rental in 2007. By 2009 National Car Rental was ranked number two, second only to Enterprise, in the 2009 Rental Car Satisfaction Study run by J.D. Power and Associates. This was the first time in the history of National Car Rental that they ranked this high in the study.
In order to achieve this result, they did not change their price points, they did not change the type of cars they offered, what they changed was the company’s ability to listen and respond to the voice of the customer. Enterprise repeated their performance with the acquisition of Alamo Car Rental and now Enterprise brands occupy four of the top five spots for Rental Car Satisfaction in the USA.
So having outstanding customer service delivers results and a big part of that is being able to capture the voice of the customer and then ensuring that information is part of the decision making process in companies.
Chief Customer Officers can push your company into the number one spot in your market by ensuring that you are taking the customer into consideration in everything you do. We are now seeing a culture shift to a customer focused culture and this shift cascades into internal customers as well. The CCO is helping companies define who their customers are but not only external customers. The best customer experience rests on an outstanding employee experience. The notion is happy employees equal happy customers. Thus the CCO will also impact your employee value proposition and in turn this will reduce staff turnover and can even reduce onboarding costs.
The CCO is delivering bottom line results for the world’s biggest brands as boardroom denizens have unearthed the value of loyal customers. For me personally, a loyal customer is 300% more valuable than other customers. If you take for example that 40% of satisfied customers don’t come back even if the service they received was more than acceptable. That number goes as high as 80% in some industries such as hospitality. In contrast a loyal customer will return time and time again drastically reducing your customer acquisition cost and in addition will bring new customers along with them.
The loyalty effect states that in a typical business a 2% or 3% increase of loyal customers will dramatically increase gross revenue and profits. These customers become ambassadors of the brand and drive sales with friends, family and clients. So the CCO is a formidable weapon in the war chest of big corporations and when used correctly they are delivering significant results.
JEANNE BLISS
I call this building a “Customer Listening Path.” As you build out your listening path, your customer journey provides the frame for storytelling. Those stages allow you to collapse multiple sources of information, such as feedback volunteered from customers as they interact with you, survey feedback, social feedback, experiential listening and other research to tell the one-company story of customer interactions with you across their journey. You can tell the story of customer perceptions of their experience and value received by stage – as they experience your business. When you present this cohesive view, you can then unite the organization to align decision making on actions that will have the most impact.
This approach helps to reduce the pressure on the survey as the only metric that the company focuses on and discusses, reducing the debate about survey results, the survey mechanism and its connection to revenue and profitability. It enables survey results to be part of a balanced understanding of experiences delivered to your customer.
This one-company approach to diagnosing and focusing on priority actions contrasts what happens today inside most well intended organizations as they review and react to survey results. See if any of this sounds familiar: As results come in separately from surveys, data reports, and social media, they are handed over to an operating area or silo to “go work on it.” Every silo or geography or channel determines to use the information. Then each interprets the results and plans actions. What happens next is…
- Every leader interprets the results and actions specific to their operating area. Action items are often selected independently, with focus on survey questions perceived to ‘belong’ them.
- The department who has the survey results handed to them to “go work on it” does some action inside their own area, and then reports back at the next meeting where it’s asked about.
- These well-intended efforts make it look like issues are being attended to, but rather than completely improving experiences, many independent projects chip away at one dimension of the experience. A lot of energy is expended with small incremental customer experience improvement.
Broken and unreliable customer experiences are often the result of many things across the operation not working exactly right. For example, “billing” is a challenging customer experience not just because of what the Billing department does. Communications, sales, marketing, operations, IT and billing all play a role in what the customer ultimately experiences. Customers experience a company across the operation, not down the silos. Doling out issues down to silo interpreting survey results alone has to change if you want to move to experience accountability and earn the right to customer-driven growth.
JOHN R PATTERSON
The CCO’s role is to make sure the voice of the customer is heard. There are so many ways that to effectively communicate the voice of the customer. The most important thing is to build it into every process in the organization and ensure that business decisions are only made while consulting the voice of the customer. If we are going to change a process or a product the first questions should be “what is the customer’s perspective on this?”
We worked with a company that was changing technology and this change was going to change every single customer’s bill, account statement and change how they interacted with the company. Early on we met with the leader who was working on this and he was about 80% done and was about to roll it out. So I asked him “What kind of customer input did you get on designing your technology?” He turned white and said he hadn’t.
They ended up spending millions of dollars and had a very difficult roll out. So it costs money when you do not include the voice of the customer in your decision making process. It has to be institutionalized in the business and leaders need to insist that big decisions include it and people need to be accountable for making sure that element is in there.
Additionally, it is not just important to have the voice of the customer but you must ensure you have the current voice of the customer. Using last year’s voice of the customer is about as dangerous as not using any at all. You have to create real time feedback mechanisms, and be proactive in your customer intelligence. You have to collect info in many ways, it is just not surveys. Customer intelligence should be one of the themes in the company and something that is taken very seriously.
There are many people who touch a customer but we do not ask them to gather intelligence. The company should make efforts to collect customer information at every touch point. You need to get involved with people at those touch points and get them involved in the process as well.
Another interesting element of customer intelligence is customer forensics and that is about understanding why a company has lost customers. That is a real important part. You have to make a sincere effort to understand why they chose another provider. This is where you have the biggest take-aways.
Summary
While consulting the customer may seem like common sense, many companies do this effectively. The Gurus are in concert on this point that institutionalizing process to ensure the voice of the customer is included in any impactful business decision is key to increasing revenue and profits. If you were thinking of increasing your customer service experience contact us at ceo@tpgleadership.com or contact one of the gurus directly.
“Your Customer Service can only be as good as the people you hire. Set up a meeting with us today to ensure you have the best people in the right seats.” — SHANE PHILLIPS, CEO, The Phillips Group
Are You Hiring a CCO or CXO?
Are you interested in drastically increasing your customer service experience? THE PHILLIPS GROUP are your talent specialists and would be delighted to help you. Please contact us at ceo@tpgleadership.com <mailto:ceo@ tpgleadership.com> or call us directly at +971 50 940 7537 if you are thinking of making any changes to your leadership team.
If you would like to hire one of the gurus you can reach them at the contact details below:
- JEANNE BLISS is the Founder and President of CustomerBliss, and the Co-Founder of The Customer Experience Professionals Association. More information about Jeanne can be found at www.customerbliss.com<http://www.customerbliss.com> and she can be contacted by email: jeanne@customerbliss.com
- SHEP HYKEN is a celebrated author and customer service expert. More information about Shep can be found at www.hyken.com<http://www.hyken.com> and he can be contacted by phone at 001 314 692 2200 or by email:…..
- JOHN R. PATTERSON is the founder and President of Progressive Insights, Inc. More information about John can be found at www.johnrpatterson.com<http://www.johnrpatterson.com> and he can be contacted by email: john@johnrpatterson.com or by phone at 001 770 329 1459.
- The CCO Council can be found here – http://www.ccocouncil.org/site/default.aspx
It was founded by Curtis Bingham and you can contact the CCO Council at Curtis@ccocouncil.org.