Articles from the CCO Council
It is all about the customer. HBR recently published its December 2016 study on Digital Transformation and found that 40% of the executives surveyed listed “Create an Exceptional Experience” as the number one priority for their digital transformations.
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Recent research by Harvard Business School indicates digital leaders outperform digital laggard’s gross margin 55% vs. 37% over three years with minimal increases in IT spend. So how do the leaders get so much more out of their digital investment?
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Customer crises strike without warning, and the chief customer officer must act swiftly and decisively to begin rebuilding damaged customer relationships. Over my years of experience working with scores of chief customer officers, I've found three steps that are crucial in successfully managing any crisis.
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Within the C-suite, each executive is uniquely accountable to a specific audience and for specific, measurable results. The CEO is accountable for shareholder value, the CFO for financial performance, the CMO for marketing awareness, and the VP of sales for quarterly revenue.
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It seems that everyone now has a Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and any other alphabet soup social media account you can think of. And rabid social media "experts" are calling for every C-level executive to embrace social media as part of their new commitment to transparency.
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Curtis Bingham outlines four must-have attributes for chief customer officers in this edition of Think Customers: The 1-to-1 Blog.
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Customers are savvier and more demanding than ever. Competition is increasing and competitive advantage is fleeting. Once-strong relationships have weakened, customers faced with an exploding array of choices, are easily swayed by competitive offerings at lower prices. How can you possibly stay ahead of this juggernaut? The answer lies in a clear and concise customer strategy, led by a Chief Customer Officer.
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For the first time, your loyal customers are listening to your competitors. They've always been bombarded by competitive offerings, but now they are open to exploring options. What can you do? There are five things you need to do now as you update your Customer Strategy to reflect the new reality of the recession.
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The Chief Customer Officer is uniquely responsible for customer value. Learn how your company can reap multiple benefits by establishing the role of a CCO.
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If you want to grow your business while increasing customer loyalty, the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) might be the solution. Learn how having someone in this role can help your company: grow revenue; increase customer profitability; increase customer loyalty and retention; develop sustainable competitive advantage; and decrease costs.
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Innovation doesn't come from great leaders, pure research unfettered by customer needs, employee innovation programs, and even brand marketing. Instead, customers must be the primary source of innovation.
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Many companies are recognizing that customers are harder to win, and more fickle than ever before. So they are seeking ways to increase the value of their customers as a true asset. This article summarizes the results of a recent study of companies such as Cisco, WebMethods, HP, People Soft and Sun that employ "executive-level customer champions." The executive-level customer champion role may have different titles such as: Chief Customer Advocate, Chief Customer Officer or Director of Customer Success. Regardless of the title, the executive-level customer champion can deliver balance to the traditional revenue growth and cost-cutting focus of the C-Suite, not to mention the board of directors. Customer champions increase the focus on customer satisfaction and ultimately customer loyalty for increased profits. The article also details the role and benefits of the Customer Champion, featuring innovative activities that some companies are using to endear their customers to them more fully and solidify loyalty.
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Do organizations have a customer conscience, insisting that customers' needs be considered at every turn? We recently studied companies like Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Monster.com, Fidelity, and others that have an executive-level customer champion and found that many companies today have indeed institutionalized the role sometimes labeled Chief Customer Officer. All the executives we interviewed shared the following four critical goals: increase revenue, bring customer balance to executive decision-making processes, manage the customer relationship as an asset, and proactively gather customer insight and drive organization-wide change.
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The only way to guarantee increased revenues, stronger, longer, and more profitable customer relationships is to center strategic decision-making on actionable customer insight. Customer Conduits are a key vehicle to obtaining unvarnished customer & marketplace insight, and numerous forms of Customer Conduits are presented.
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How do you create insatiable demand? This kind of demand that significantly increases sustainable revenue from existing and new customers, increases loyalty, decreases customer acquisition costs, and increases profitability only comes as you focus more strategically and tactically upon the Demand Chain. This article introduces the Demand Chain and describes the key differences between it and the Supply Chain. It describes specific steps companies can take to more fully manage their Demand Chain and ultimately achieve Stage 5 of Demand Chain Excellence.
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Customers hate arrogant marketers and their puffery, gloss, and slick sales tactics. Customers don’t care about your credentials, track record, or industry awards. They want to know whether or not what you have to offer is going to satisfy a need. To be successful, you must market to solve customer pain. This article tells you how you can create “you-centric” marketing that clearly addresses the pain customers feel and compellingly describes how their pain will be made to “go away”. Read this to help quickly fill the pipeline with qualified prospects, clinch a sale, win a new customer, and bring in revenue.
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Declining prices & margins. Decaying sales. Unprofitable customers. Lackluster market performance. Does your company suffer from these maladies? You will if you don’t understand your customers—what they need, want, and most especially, what they are willing to pay for. The only way to guarantee increased revenues, stronger, longer, and more profitable customer relationships is to center strategic decision-making on actionable customer insight.
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Shortest time to market no longer cuts it. Nor does lowest cost. And excellent customer service is now expected. As the old rules for achieving competitive advantage fade away, what can be done to secure customers and vanquish competitors? Increasingly the only true, sustainable competitive advantage is intimate and thorough understanding of customer needs. This article describes ways in which companies can develop such clear "customer insight," then use it to win profits and the loyalty of "savvy" customers.
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