Curtis on...Key Challenges for CCOs: Measuring and Demonstrating Results
Curtis N. Bingham, Founder and Executive Director of the Chief Customer Officer Council, offers practical suggestions CCOs can implement in order to demonstrate their results to senior management and to the rest of their organizations.
Transcript for Curtis on...Key Challenges for CCOs: Measuring and Demonstrating Results
One of the big challenges that chief customer officers have is in measuring and demonstrating results. Organizations are measuring transactions in discrete events left and right. There's a measurement for everything; and yet, customer emotions and behavior are oftentimes much harder to measure. And this makes measuring the impact of the CCO very hard. It's very difficult to tie measurements of customer emotions and behavior to revenue and profitability.
This difficulty in measurement here is, perhaps, the biggest reason for the fragility of the Chief Customer Officer in the C-suite. This role is the most fragile, and the average tenure is only 29.4 months. And I think that the biggest reason here is because it's very hard to prove the value of what the CCO does.
You couple this with the fact that many CCOs are so focused on serving customers and better meeting customer needs that they struggle a little bit with self-advocacy. So the challenge for CCOs is to balance bragging with successes, and there are a couple of things that can be done.
First off, if you're the CEO, sit down with your CCO and choose metrics carefully. When you're looking at measures of customer centricity or customer experience or customer loyalty, at first, anything is better than nothing—any measurement. Whether it's just Net Promoter Scores or Customer Loyalty Index, it doesn't really matter. Anything is valuable at first.
And then, as the metrics begin to mature, you need to migrate to measures that properly balance revenue and profit and loyalty. You need to be an advocate for the CCO to show that customer centricity is the new competitive advantage.
If you're the Chief Customer Officer, you need to communicate the value of customer-centric change to the organization. Tell the customer story. Show how the customer's condition has improved but don't forget to show how the business condition has improved because just serving customers at the expense of the business doesn't help anybody in the long term.
Select your metrics carefully. Ensure that you're measuring the right things and that you're not being caught by the law of averages and missing powerful data and insight that may be lost as you look deeper into some of your outliers.
At the end of the day, this is a marketing strategy. You need to share the results. You need to very carefully choose your key customers, your early adopters. You need to choose those people who need to be engaged early in the business, who are the most influential within the communities, and show them what the value of customer centricity is so that they can, then, tell your story to others. Leverage allies to help sell the notion of customer centricity, to share the results, and to demonstrate the results that you offer to the company.