Why do so many Chief Customer Officers fail in the job?
While large cap companies around the world have started adding a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) to the ranks of their corner office executives, the CCO is also the most likely to fail in the job. Their tenure has been less than two years in many cases. I asked the Guru’s “Why do so many CCOs fail in the job?” and this is what they had to say.
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.
I asked the Gurus “Why do so many CCOs fail in the job?” and this is what they had to say:
SHEP HYKEN
This is not always the CCOs fault as in some cases the company has not defined the role enough to have them do a proper job in it or allow them to measure their impact effectively. Companies are still trying to understand the CCO and where their responsibilities end and start. Secondly senior leaders underestimate the task at hand, which is a change culture initiative. A culture change involves tough choices and people who do not fit have to go. So the role of the CCO needs Board support and a commitment to change from the whole organization.
The CCO who is coming into a new job needs to be very clear about the extent of the role and what amount of organizational change is required. It starts at the top, and when I come onto a new assignment I will ask one of the C-Suite executives for the vision of the company and often they don’t know it.
The vision and mission statements are convoluted and that can be a red flag for larger problems that the CCO may succumb to. The CCO needs to calculate how aligned the senior leadership team is and how committed they are to the change. The Ritz Carleton has a mantra that says “ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen”. It is simple and easy for anyone in the organization to understand.
The other thing I do to ensure success is when I go into companies I make the room work. If we are in a retail chain then we want someone from the retail store in the room, if we are in a manufacturing business then we want someone from the factory in the room. We need to know what the company stands for in one sentence and it has to be something that the whole company can resonate with.
So all levels of the business have to be involved in improving the customer experience. Often the CCO is restricted in their ability to reach all levels of the organization and this can be a death kneel for them.
The other piece is creating service standards and these are standards that everyone has to live by. The leadership of the company has to live these standards and they have to deploy it. Communicating it is only part of it, it is the leadership that has to demonstrate it. If they are not incongruent it all falls apart.
So the CCO needs to work hand in hand with every department with ultimate support from the CEO, the rest of the C-Suite and the Board. If the CCO does not have this it will be hard for them to succeed. There are many other things as well as measuring their impact but that could be another white paper.
JEANNE BLISS
A. The CCO role is often unsuccessful when the C-Suite is not united in understanding their role and ongoing personal commitment in working with the CCO as a united team. Customer experience transformation and the work of this role fail also when too much work is layered on too soon, not breaking the work into achievable segments. And often these roles are established without leaders agreeing to the tactics and energy necessary to lead achieve a customer-driven transformation.
I am an advocate of a set of deliberate activities that evolve and mature leaders’ commitment and actions to embed critical new competencies and enable business transformation. But often this work is jumped into with a plate full of projects and report out on their progress. The work becomes too quickly attached to project plan movement rather than customer life improvement. The work of the CCO is just one more ‘work stream’ added to the report out.
To ensure greater success in the role, I encourage moving this work through the deliberate phases this Customer Leadership Maturity Map. This work will be successful when CCO’s take a stair-stepped approach to gaining leadership clarity and commitment to the framework and actions. As they embed new company competencies, over time, what the company stands for and its marketplace position will shift along with customer-driven growth. Starting with the lives of customers and employees will drive decision-making and elevate the brand in the marketplace.
Following is a summary of the milestones that define most clients’ transformation effort in embedding the Five Competencies. For each phase of the Maturity Map, I’ve identified actions and behavior changes along the continuum of years one through five as the competencies are being embedded. After year five, it is a matter of sharpening and improving these competencies for your organization. By their very nature, the five competencies are not a program, but rather a repeated cycle of one-company awareness, understanding, focus and united action. We are finding that it takes about three years to have these become very comfortable inside the organization and up to five years until they are really embedded into the DNA of the business.
JOHN R PATTERSON
The biggest issue with the success of the CCO is that most companies, especially large cap publicly traded companies measure results in quarters, and even in months in most cases; whereas the role of the CCO is a multiple year effort. You cannot change a culture in thirty days. It often takes three to four years to evolve as an organization so a lot of what the CCO does is not felt immediately.
The real success of the CCO is about changing how leaders in the organization behave. In essence you want to change how the organization behaves with its customers and that behavioral change starts with the leadership and cascades across every department to every employee. While it includes tangible items like policies, procedures and training and development it also includes the intangibles like the collective subconscious of the organization and its culture. This takes time and results in these areas do not happen overnight.
Secondly, the CCO needs the support of the senior leadership team and the leadership team needs to be aligned on creating a customer focused culture. The CCO needs to engage with each senior leader and effectively collaborate with them to have them lead change in their respective areas of responsibility.
They need the top executives in the company to do work that changes the customer experience in their departments. The CCO efforts have to be aligned across business functions in order to create a customer centric culture. Without this alignment the CCO will fail. Many CCOs don’t get the full support they need to be effective and as a result they are doomed before they even start.
This job is really about influencing. The CCO has to able to get work done by influencing and that influence has to run across the business at all levels. From Board members to entry level staff, the CCO has to be able to create consensus and rally support for ideas that will result in organizational sea change. This is a very challenging part of the CCOs job and is often a sticking point for new CCOs. There are of course numerous other ways to fail in this challenging role but these are two of the most common.
JEANNE BLISS
Five Competencies Maturity Map
Graph here (ladder type)
Commit – Leadership Commitment to 5 Competency Framework
United & Build – One-Company Building & Reliability Improvement
Embed – Competencies Embedded to Ensure Experience Reliability
Mature – Competency Maturity Drives Experience Differentiation
Elevate – Competency Behavior & Action Earn Company Differentiation
COMMIT. Gain leadership clarity and commitment to the Five- Competency framework or strategy. This work hinges on c-l-a-r-i-t-y. Executives need to understand with specifics the work that is ahead, both in terms of company action and their action, decision-making and behavior.
UNITE AND BUILD. Unite leaders and the organization in competency building and first round or experience reliability improvement actions. In this phase two outcomes are important. Initiating the build of your 5-competency engine. And taking actions that focus on and improve priority experiences. Think of this as your beta version of this work. First, initiating your 5-competency engine means to begin the process of building your first ‘clunky’ version of each competency. Don’t get caught up in the trap that they must be perfect to get started.
EMBED. At this stage, the competencies are now part of how you do work inside your company. By this stage your leadership team should be united in driving accountability by customer journey stage, rather than silo-by-silo. Because they have now been an active part of the first generation of the five competencies, there should be an appreciation of resources necessary to sustain the cycle they establish as part of the operation. Employee teams should have been trained throughout the company on the “Customer Experience Development- CXD” process for improvement. The five competencies should now be embedded as part of building products, establishing services and conducting annual planning.
MATURE. You are now actively engaged in experience innovation and differentiation. By this phase, you should have tackled the majority of the irregular and unreliable customer experiences plaguing the customer journey along key touchpoints. This opens up resources for identifying and improving touchpoints for experience differentiation and innovation. Use the embedded competencies at this point to commit to differentiating moments in the customer journey. Employees should be able to work top down and bottoms up, practicing the five competencies, to build these experiences.
ELEVATE. Company Differentiation. Your company and people are differentiated in the marketplace by how you conduct yourself in business. By now, the five leadership competencies have been embedded into your business engine and are part of the way people work, are compensated and rewarded. Annual planning begins with an understanding of the growth or loss of your customer asset and the inflection points along your journey where opportunity exists. Experience reliability is managed, and leaders care about the process metrics which impact customer asset growth with as much rigor as they care about outcome metrics such as sales goals. You hire and enable employees guided by your customer journey framework.
Summary
The customer is the lifeblood of any company and a businesses’ ability to grow and thrive rests in its ability to win and retain new customers. The Chief Customer Officer is focused on helping companies increase their customer experience and as a result drive top and bottom line results. By adding a Customer Officer to the C-Suite of your company ensure that you will stay competitive in an ever changing and dynamic global market.
“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.