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As a Chief Customer Officer (CCO), I can attest to the many benefits the role brings to a business. CCOs strengthen the customer experience by creating a customer-centric focus across all touch points in the buyer journey. By bringing this focus, CCOs help maximize customer retention, added revenue and overall profitability.
Organizations must first build a culture that is focused on the customer experience, and trust employees to make customers their top priority to get the most value from this role. To do this, executive leadership needs to foster an environment that breeds success for their employees.
Before you can deliver a winning customer experience, you must attend to the well-being of your employees. If employees don’t feel cared for and empowered, they won’t demonstrate the commitment and passion that’s needed to cultivate superior customer care.
By creating a culture where employees are inspired and motivated, organizations create a foundation for a better customer experience. Ultimately, the responsibility for achieving this lies with the CEO.
When the right culture is in place, organizations are more able to attract top talent. According to U.S. findings in PwC’s 2017 Global CEO Survey: “In a world where we all have access to the same technology and information, talent is what will distinguish an organization from the competition.”
While every company has its own unique personality, key attributes of a winning culture include professional growth opportunities, competitive compensation and benefits, gender and racial non-discriminatory policies, and support for work-life balance. When employees feel valued and protected, you are more able to fully maximize the advantages a CCO can bring to your organization.
Think of businesses with fanatic customers, such as Apple, Tesla, and Salesforce. These companies have built their brand by focusing on customers. With core values and a customer-first approach, your brand gains more credibility.
At Xactly, customer focus is the first pillar of our core values and has been critical to our brand’s success, including customer campaigns such as #XactlyLovesMe.
It’s up to the CCO to make sure that company leaders hear the voice of the customer, and that customer needs are kept paramount in all decision-making. With a seat at the C-level table, the CCO carries the flag for the voice of the customer at the executive level.
The office of the CCO also builds the foundation for a company’s customer approach. By building a unified platform across the organization, CCOs help drive a customer-first mentality by removing interdepartmental silos. With those barriers removed, all departments engaging with customers can deliver a consistent customer experience that supports your organization’s core customer values.
Leveraging data has become essential to almost every aspect of the business, including customer care. With customer data that’s integrated, accessible, and standardized across all departments, CCOs can be sure that everyone is looking at customers in the same way with the most up-to-date information. With a consistent customer view across the organization, it’s also easier for teams to compare and measure results and trends accurately.
Data also gives organizations the ability to personalize the customer experience, such as segmenting customers by filters. You might filter customers by their size, revenue, industry or location. Your largest customers will most likely have different needs and challenges than your smaller customers. By segmenting appropriately, you can personalize the customer journey for each segment. You can create messaging that engages with different customers in a more personal way targeted toward their particular needs.
Data also allows you to track and understand your customer’s experience more completely, gaining valuable insights for the business. You can monitor exactly when customers leave, for example, in order to better analyze root causes and the event or set of events that might cause a customer churn.
Having data at your disposal gives you indicators to ensure the health of your customer accounts. By collecting more granular data, you can understand wherein the process problems occur, so you can see why they’re happening and address the issues – thus, using data to deflect a negative outcome.
Data can also give you understanding into customer usage and patterns, so you can be sure they’re getting the most value from your product or solution.
The office of the CCO can be valuable to helping companies continually rethink and improve upon how they serve customers throughout their entire lifecycle.
By truly putting their customers first in all decisions, organizations see higher retention rates and can drive more sales.
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Bernie Kassar is Chief Customer Officer at Xactly Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise-class, cloud-based, incentive compensation for employee and sales performance management. Xactly’s products allow organizations to make strategic decisions, increase employee performance, improve margins, and mitigate risks.
