• Author: Jeanne Bliss
  • Full Title: Chief Customer Officer 2.0
  • Tags: #Inbox #books

Highlights

  • Chapter 1 Chief Customer Officer Role Clarity (Location 436)
  • we've got to take the reactive nature out of this work. Our work must be about embedding behaviors and competencies in the organization: Competencies that will transform how the business and operation are run, to achieve customer-driven growth. (Location 447)
  • role clarity and executive alignment is paramount. Without it, you run the risk of being defined as the fix-it person. And that's not who you want to be. (Location 451)
  • the one nagging the silos to take action. (Location 457)
    • Note: T
  • The Five Customer Leadership Competencies (Location 469)
  • For customer experience efforts to become valued and considered critical to driving growth they must rise above the fray of being defined as problem solving or chasing survey scores. The work must be defined as building your customer-driven growth engine, with the CCO role as the architect of that engine. (Location 470)
  • establish the connection to business growth. (Location 479)
  • Customer Asset Management is to know what customers actually did to impact business growth or loss versus what they say they might do via survey results. (Location 504)
  • For example: how many new customers did you bring in this quarter, by volume and value (power of your acquisition engine); how many customers were lost this quarter, by volume and value (power of the experience and value perceived); how many increased their purchases; and how many reduced their level of engagement with you? The (Location 506)
  • The role of the CCO is to engage leaders and the organization to want to be a part of one-company storytelling to unite decision-making and drive cross-company focus and action. That's why I call (Location 576)
  • The role of the CCO is to drive executive appetite for wanting to know about these interruptions in customers' lives, simplifying how they are delivered, and facilitating a one-company response to these key operational performance areas. (Location 607)
  • But a scalable experience occurs when we begin giving people the ability to make the right decisions. At OpenX, for example, we learned that we had to give account managers permission to make decisions to grow and scale the business. (Location 645)
  • Over time, one of this engine's most potent impacts is in prioritizing investments for customer-driven growth by shifting the annual planning process. Instead of starting with the silos, leaders start with the customers' lives, identify priorities, and then determine collectively (Location 670)
  • As we go into our planning cycle we prepare the organization with a “State of the Customer” report. In this report we walk through what has improved and the lingering issues. (Location 679)
  • identify highlights and priorities by customer journeys specific to regions or countries. (Location 681)
  • synthesize the customer experience for the past year, gathering insight from multiple sources: trended complaints, inbound feedback from the web and call centers, social media feedback, operational performance, and survey results. (Location 682)
  • identify “the top five-problems” list to be tackled by market area and the biggest success achieved in the current year. (Location 684)
  • identify the two to three company-wide priorities (Location 685)
  • As you build out these five competencies, your role as the customer leadership executive is to connect them to be the storyteller. Tell stories that move customers off spreadsheets, engage people personally in customers' lives, and compel prioritized and focused action. (Location 703)
  • the ocean” with an overwhelming implementation plan. Here are the three methods we find to be most successful. Break the five competencies down into crawl-walk-run action steps. For example, in Competency 1, Honoring and Managing Customers as Assets, don't wait until you have all the data perfectly aligned and automated until you roll this out. (Location 713)
  • The five competencies establish an engine for driving customer growth. The CCO facilitates the construct of the engine, engaging leaders and employees throughout the company. The engine enables one-company customer growth behavior and actions. Without this united engine, activities go back to being ruled by squeaky wheel issues, executive-driven one-off action items, and silo-by-silo priorities. (Location 748)
  • Chapter 2 Unite Leadership to Achieve Customer-Driven Growth (Location 767)
  • Uniting the leadership team in the purpose of delivering one-company experiences and connecting them to business growth is the goal of the Chief Customer Officer. (Location 802)
  • Pivotal Leadership Shift: Elevate Customers as Assets (Location 806)
  • Customers as assets measure the impact of the end-to-end experiences of your business. (Location 807)
  • We will examine how many donors we lost compared with how many new donors we brought in, viewed against our existing base of donors. This will give us a net donor growth or decline metric. (Location 819)
  • Customers as Assets Is an Attitude Shift, Not a Dashboard (Location 832)
  • They must become fearless enough to start meetings connecting the efforts of the entire organization to the growth or loss of this asset. Did we, all together, earn the right to growth? (Location 837)
  • Remove Survey Score Addiction by Adding Customer Asset Metrics (Location 842)
  • Elevating Customers as Assets Diminishes “Leap of Faith” for this Work (Location 859)
  • Let me ask you a question: Is your job focused on getting items fixed that emerge out of survey results? Are you seen as the fix-it person? If you are, then this work is still not thought of as a growth strategy. It's thought of as a cost to the business. It's seen as new work layered on top of the “real” work (we love that, don't we?). Which may be why your place on the CEO's meeting agenda moves down and down the page until sometimes it slips right off. (Location 860)
  • lack of understanding of how to quantify success for customer-centric work drives survey score addiction. (Location 864)
  • The connection between improved scores and improved growth is not always clear. That means “customer focus” may be a top agenda item of the organization, but it's not easily quantified. So (Location 870)
  • When our survey was new and fresh, understanding the score worked to galvanize people and give a target. But now that we are mature in our process, it is fatiguing. (Location 879)
  • Rather than focusing on the score as the thing to watch and see value in, we want people to learn and be invigorated by using the verbatim comments to understand, at (Location 881)
  • of the product as the asset of our business. This is a critical shift because it causes us to think about the customer, the life of the person buying the product. This totally changes what we think of as success.” (Location 893)
  • What would change in your company if every executive meeting started with “Did we earn the right to customer growth?” (Location 898)
  • Then move to specifics. In each segment of your customer base, how many new customers were acquired, in whole numbers—in volume and value? (Location 899)
  • Next, by segment of your customer base, how many customers did we lose, in whole numbers—in volume and value? (Location 900)
  • Incremental growth had to come from existing customers by delivering an experience they would want to have again and tell others about. (Location 924)
  • This yields an immediate understanding of the complexity and scale of the job required to integrate customer experience and customer profitability into the business model. (Location 936)
  • Most companies have a (Location 941)
  • predominant power core. Frequently it is the strongest skill set in the company or the most comfortable to senior executives. (Location 941)
  • increasing loyalty and diminishing rejecters starts with changing the behaviors that were driving customers away. (Location 976)
  • In these organizations, we often gain the greatest momentum when we focus first on partnering with product development to add value to them, using customer feedback and insights to improve the product. (Location 993)
  • When Product Development or Product Engineering Is Your Power Core (Location 1000)
  • Product development groups get the most resources and the most play, and they have the most power. Just look at the organization chart. Metrics are about new products, sizes of products, getting products out, speed of product development, and competitive progress of products in relation to competitors. (Location 1002)
  • When Sales Is Your Power Core (Location 1005)
  • Performance is frequently measured in short-term sales goals and targets. Sales targets are the strongest and most tracked corporate metrics. (Location 1007)
  • When Engineering or Information Technology Is Your Power Core (Location 1011)
  • It's all about presenting people with comparative data that's actionable. I mean actionable for the business, for a particular organization, for a team, and for the individual. (Location 1027)
  • For the engineering teams in particular, we use product scorecards to show how every characteristic of a product impacts the broader customer experience. The scorecards are effective because they establish one common framework and language for assessing and reacting to customer sentiment. The exact same concept applies to how we measure and compare services, relationship management, ease of doing business, and other aspects of the customer experience. (Location 1030)
  • We provide our engineers with both the qualitative customer feedback—anecdotes, complaints, praise—and the quantitative data combined. All of this together gives us a complete “voice of the customer” perspective. Having rich data is great, but having the narrative from customers describing the effect we have on their business puts the data into the right context so that they can fully comprehend what they are building and improve on what and how they deliver. (Location 1034)
  • When the Customer Is Your Power Core (Location 1062)
  • Company decisions start with clearly understanding what will deliver value to customers in the short and long term. Leaders are united in efforts to deliver a reliable and differentiated customer experience to drive the greatest amount of profitable customers. While silos exist, they are united with clarity of purpose in improving customers' lives. Planning and decision-making teams assemble for experience creation and delivery, not just silo-based projects. Employees are enabled to deliver value to customers and are also honored as assets of the company. (Location 1063)
  • customer needs drive the overall plan for what's developed and delivered. (Location 1068)
  • Behavior 1: Unite the Leadership Team (Location 1131)
  • When I realized that a big part of my role as a customer leadership executive was to bring the leadership team together to debate and come to agreement on united actions and behaviors, it was a watershed moment. (Location 1135)
  • Customer experience efforts should begin by engaging and aligning leaders to understand the actions, resources and commitment necessary. (Location 1143)
  • Behavior 2: Give Permission and Behaviors to Model (Location 1148)
  • Employees, customers, and partners need proof that your actions match your words. With every decision you make, employees and customers are watching. Did products get released prior to being ready because sales targets needed to be met? Were customer promises met that your partners were not prepared to deliver? (Location 1149)
  • People will model the example you set by your decisions. You need to give them permission with good examples to follow. I call this “marketing hope.” (Location 1173)
  • Behavior 3: Prove It with Actions. Establish One-Company Accountability (Location 1178)
  • silos individually dissect survey results and take actions. (Location 1179)
  • There is a galvanizing action you can take that helps to get you out of the fray of the silo-by-silo projects and report-outs. And that is to unite leaders for regular and customer experience accountability. (Location 1182)
  • Convened monthly and quarterly and prior to annual (Location 1184)
  • planning, The customer room unites leaders to understand customers' lives, their journey with your company, and emerging issues that require focus. (Location 1185)
  • Your job is to be the company storyteller of your customers' lives. That means beginning to embed a new way of talking about the business—by leading conversations around the customer journey, their lives with you. (Location 1225)
  • Use Your Journey Map to Focus on Customer Priorities (Location 1234)
  • The hard part for us came in prioritizing. We identified the risky moments, where if we didn't deliver, we would lose customer confidence. (Location 1252)
  • Then we translated all that into a short list of moments that matter. (Location 1255)
  • We identified the tangible things we could measure and the quality of those moments, and we also measured the perception at those inflection moments. (Location 1257)
  • As you build the engine of these five competencies, your role as the customer leadership executive is to connect them to be the storyteller. Tell the story of how your experience impacted customer's lives and how their reactions impact growth. Then build out of each of the five competencies, customized to your organization, to elevate the work past red-yellow-green projects to deliberately taking one-company actions to earn the right to growth. (Location 1279)
  • Here is the volume and value of incoming customers, and the volume and value of lost customers, and other patterns of customer behavior that show more engagement or diminishment (Location 1287)
  • We have called and communicated with lost customers and here is the ‘WHY’ behind their departures.” (Location 1289)
  • Competency Two: Align around Experience (Location 1290)
  • In stage 1, here are the issues emerging from the “unaided” or voluntary feedback customers gave us as they were interacting with us through our call centers, website, stores. (Location 1296)
  • stage 2…social media is spiking as we are not meeting requests for information. (Location 1298)
  • stage 3, our contract language and terms are causing a spike in customer issues. (Location 1299)
  • In stage two, as customers are reaching out to get information about our products as they do their research, the three operational metrics most critical to the customer experience are not meeting our minimum acceptable performance standard. It's no wonder complaints are spiking. Here is where we are interrupting customers' ability to get value from our experience. (Location 1305)
  • in stage 3 that we are below our standard performance for the cycle of getting a proposal to the customer. (Location 1308)
  • While you have the CCO role, you may not realize you also need to “earn” the right to people's engagement in the work. What we've learned with every client is that to earn the engagement from leaders, you must show how building the five-competency customer-driven growth engine simplifies and improves the processes of running the business. (Location 1319)
  • When the five competencies are embedded into the organization with leadership behavior, they are so clear that they become the work of the organization. There is no separation between the “customer” work and the “real” work. They connect to growth, and they shift attitudes from chasing the score to caring about and improving customer lives. You're probably not there yet. (Location 1322)
  • Culprit 2: Work Is Layered On and Capacity Creation Is Not Addressed (Location 1351)
  • Every time I meet with a client, I ask how good they are at building their “stop doing” list. That question is almost always greeted with laughter. And here's why. There's no common framework for deciding what starts and what stops. (Location 1356)
  • Culprit 3: Lack of Rigor in Holding People Accountable (Location 1364)
  • The emphasis is on “did you get it done?” rather than “how did you improve the lives of our customers?” (Location 1374)
  • When a solution takes hold and customer complaints on the issue start to decline (which cannot be “gamed” to get a better result), the teams can be rewarded—based on improving customers' lives. (Location 1385)
  • To quell the concerns we have been communicating more with our employees: We need to focus; we are doing too much The truth is that duplicate efforts are costly and impede action Management is united in this approach We need to focus on the best ROI initiatives for revenue potential and cost savings (Location 1402)
  • Culprit 4: Annual Planning and IT Investment (Location 1410)
  • While the five Customer Leadership Competencies frame the work to be done in your role as CCO, it is attitudinal shifts in leadership thinking and behaviors and your engagement to unite leaders that will determine the successful transformation of your business. (Location 1421)
  • Focus on Growth and Customers as Assets. Remove Survey Score Addiction. Identify Your Power Core. Know What Helps or Hinders the Work. Unite Leadership and Connect Talk to Action. Eliminate the “Baloney” Factor. Tell the Story of Customers' Lives. Care Why Customers Stay or Go. Improve the Business Engine. Earn the Right to do This Work. (Location 1427)
  • Clarify how customer experience is not customer service. (Location 1443)
  • Step leaders through the current experience of (Location 1444)
  • a priority customer journey to have a firsthand view of what is being delivered as a result of the silos working independently. (Location 1445)
  • Gain agreement with your C-Suite that the CCO role is to actively work with the leadership team to architect the customer-driven growth engine. (Location 1452)
  • Gain further commitment after this higher level of understanding that they still want to move forward building your customer-driven growth engine. Begin to build out and take actions. See each competency chapter for first actions to begin executing on with the leadership team. (Location 1456)
  • set out to establish relationships with the entire leadership team, to engage them in this work. (Location 1464)
  • Client Experience Leadership Council. (Location 1466)
  • Chapter 3 Competency One: Honor and Manage Customers as Assets (Location 1484)
  • This is the clincher competency. It is what makes this work legitimate. It's why you are in business: to grow the customer asset. (Location 1489)
  • Leaders must start taking it personally that customers are departing from their business. (Location 1496)
  • They need to care about the “math” between customers in and customers out—because that delta drives growth. They need to make the connection between customer experience improvement and the movement of these metrics. (Location 1496)
  • Rather than talking about customer retention, let's begin each meeting discussing our raw numbers of: Number of new customers earned in this period, by volume and value (power of your acquisition engine); sorted by segment. (Location 1524)
  • Number of lost or lapsed customers lost in this period, by volume and value (power of the experience and value perceived); how many increased their purchases, and how many declined in their level of engagement with you? Sorted by segment. (Location 1526)
  • Behavioral patterns that show increase or weakening of the customer relationships. Movement of customers within value segments. Referrals from existing customers. (Location 1529)
  • It is important to present your Customer asset metrics in whole numbers of customers, not retention rates, so that there is a clear connection between people and the math. (Location 1531)
  • The true measure of whether customers found value from their experience and treatment is not actively discussed, debated, or factored into decisions, strategy, and action. (Location 1541)
  • Baseline Customer Asset Metrics (Location 1543)
  • Customer Asset Metric 1: New Customers—Volume and Value (Location 1551)
  • The work is to unite the definitions and databases so that you can achieve a company-wide rolled-up number of new customers. (Location 1555)
  • What is more difficult to track is the quality or value of incoming customers. (Location 1556)
  • How many new customers did you acquire in the period? What is their projected (Location 1562)
  • value? (Location 1563)
  • Customer Asset Metric 2: Lost Customers—Volume and Value and Reasons (Location 1564)
  • Why (Location 1565)
  • In addition to knowing which customers have left, you need to know the reasons why they left. (Location 1569)
  • You have to create a purposeful way to enable customers to inform you they're cutting you loose. (Location 1571)
  • As part of this process you'll need a method to track and understand the following: How many new customers were lost or lapsed? What is their value? Who are they? Why did they leave? (Location 1575)
  • Customer Asset Metric 3: Do the Math—Net Growth or Loss of Your Customer Asset (Location 1599)
  • Customer Asset Metric 4: A Simple Set of Customer Behaviors Indicating Growth or Loss of Relationship (Location 1612)
  • identifying behaviors that show both increased and decreased involvement and perception of value. (Location 1614)
  • Referrals received by customer segment. (Location 1627)
  • In fact, we often engage the CEO and CFO and CMO in the build-out of customer asset metrics. (Location 1700)
  • Customer asset metrics cut through those questions. They measure what customers did as a result of their experience with you, not what they say they are going to do via survey results. (Location 1721)
  • Chapter 4 Competency Two: Align around Experience (Location 1762)
  • Companies that transform how they grow and are deliberate about it, do so because they think about the people at the end of their decisions. (Location 1767)
  • The intent of their work is to “earn the right” to growth by improving customers' lives. (Location 1768)
  • A journey framework, even in its simplest form, when used with consistency provides rigor to understand where the priorities in customers' lives are. (Location 1769)
  • That is the real transformational power in building a customer (and employee) journey map. It is to embed a new starting point for the work of the organization. Instead of starting with the silos, the customer journey gives you a framework to begin with your customers' lives. (Location 1773)
  • Every leader I have worked with and every leadership team I have coached have asked for simple language to galvanize people around customer-driven growth. The customer journey provides that talk track. (Location 1777)
  • Leaders who use the journey map to diagnose the experience and its impact on the growth or shrinkage of the customer asset are most successful because they connect the dots between the two in storytelling to the organization. Starting with Competency 1: “As a result of the experience we delivered to our customers in the last month or quarter or year, here is the growth or loss of our customer asset.” And then continuing to Competency 2: “Now we will traverse across the journey stages to discover where we helped or hindered customer asset growth.” (Location 1802)
  • And, most important, the customer journey provides the framework to diagnose and care about the “why?” What circumstances causing customers to stay, grow, depart, or diminish their relationship with the company? (Location 1810)
  • Why did customers leave? What did we do to cause them to decrease their services? Why haven't they used 50 percent of the software they purchased? By simplifying the outcome of the experience as growth or loss of the customer asset, leaders become more interested in understanding and getting to the bottom of the reasons “why?” (Location 1813)
  • please don't make journey mapping a shiny object that you take on because everyone else is doing it. (Location 1828)
  • A SIMPLE Journey Map Is Good (Location 1835)
  • The initial phase of journey mapping we find to be most beneficial is to get alignment on the number of customer journeys that you might want to build over time (Location 1840)
  • Naming the Stages Can Change Your Culture (Location 1846)
  • As you take on journey mapping, make your first action gaining agreement on the names of the stages of the journey. This is very important. Naming the customer journey stages begins the shift from independent silo activities to understanding the complete experiences or objectives that customers are trying to achieve (Location 1846)
  • It's helpful to think about every stage as a complete experience, with an outcome where the customer… Can state what they were able to accomplish. Is clear about the value they received. Wants to continue working with you. Is compelled to tell others about their experience, product, or service. (Location 1851)
  • ACTION LAB: CUSTOMER-CENTRIC JOURNEY STAGES (Location 1855)
  • Ultimately, we identified five priorities based on consumer moments-of-truth (MOTs): the trial, delivery, service, rider community, and product experience. (Location 1879)
  • Unite Leaders: Why Are We in Business? (Location 1896)
  • how your business improves customers' lives. (Location 1897)
  • But the question I always ask is this: Is that statement used daily as a decision-making lens for uniting the organization in making operational decisions? Do people know it and use it to improve customers' lives and earn the right to growth? (Location 1898)
  • “Clarity of Purpose.” Simply put, your clarity of purpose must guide operating decisions. (Location 1900)
  • Take this litmus test to determine what you're telling employees is important in their work. Find your company mission statement and give it a read. Is it about how your company will emerge as the leader in your field or become known for a marketplace position to be achieved in x years? Or is it about your higher purpose in improving customers' lives? (Location 1919)
  • The adoption stage is the critical stage of the customer experience that occurs after a customer found us, evaluated us, and made a purchase. It is a very short time window where we have to prove value for future growth with them. It is a critical defector pipeline moment. (Location 2041)
  • The transformational power in building a customer journey map is to embed a new starting point for the work of the organization. Instead of starting with the silos, the journey guides the organization to align their work to priorities in customers' lives. (Location 2052)
  • Chapter 5 Competency Three: Build a Customer Listening Path (Location 2074)
  • As you build out your listening path, your customer journey provides the path for storytelling. (Location 2085)
  • Here are the three actions to build your customer listening path: Collect feedback from multiple sources to tell the comprehensive story of customers' lives. When multiple sources of feedback point to the same issue or opportunity, we see a halt to company debate. There is power in convergence. (Location 2147)
  • Build one-company categorization of issues, so that when collected across the company, they roll-up to volumes that command attention. (Location 2151)
  • Present information from multiple sources by stage of the experience. This is a game-changer, as issues and opportunities will always be in reference to customers when they are presented in this manner. (Location 2152)
  • Unaided feedback provides real-time trending on customer issues as they are occurring. (Location 2191)
  • What I see when we start this work is that companies who do capture volunteer customer feedback can't prove its impact because it can't roll up to a consistent trend of issues or opportunities. The call center has one categorization they track and report, marketing has their own, and sales has their own. Social media is often (Location 2199)
  • Customer behavior data in response to experiences, products, services Call center volunteer feedback Social media on your customer boards and external sites Warranty or claim experience volunteer feedback Website voluntary feedback Return experience voluntary feedback (Location 2207)
  • Experiential listening steps your leaders and people in your company through experiences your customers go through. The (Location 2237)
  • Lost and Lapsed Customer Calling Process—Some Tips and Guidelines (Location 2259)
  • Build Your Customer Listening Path (Location 2264)
  • Organize all surveys by stage of the customer journey in which the customer receives it. Even a basic set of journey stages is okay here. What you need to see is where there is surveying overlap and, most important, you need to see what your customer sees and experiences. (Location 2380)
  • We traverse the customer journey and ask three things for every stage: how is it going, how does it make them feel, and what would help them to meet their need in each stage? (Location 2396)
  • Grade how reliably you tell customers what you did with the feedback they provided. Just as it is important to market hope to coworkers to inform them of actions taken to improve customer experiences and get rid of roadblocks in their jobs, it's of equal importance to tell customers how you've honored and heeded their feedback. Do you do this reliably? (Location 2405)