Curtis On…Customer Centricity as a Marketing Strategy: 3. Executive Support & Your Offering
In this third of a ten part series of videos, Curtis Bingham, Founder and Executive Director of the Chief Customer Officer Council on location at IQPC's CMO Exchange in London, July 2011, explains the next two steps in embedding customer centricity: enlisting executive support and identifying the nature of your offering.
Transcript for Curtis On…Customer Centricity as a Marketing Strategy: 3. Executive Support & Your Offering
Executive support: We've talked a little bit about this in different sessions here. The key is that anytime that you're tweaking the brand and anytime that you're doing something that impacts the brand you have to have the support of your CEO—the CEO buy-in. And it's not just the CEO. It's the C-suite; it's all of your peers who are sitting around table.
As was mentioned in the previous session here, it's not about being brand-led. It's about getting everybody around the table, these cross-functional teams, to agree that “this is the direction that we're going.”
The most successful chief customer officers in the world today have the implicit and explicit support of their CEO. Now, it's interesting (a side note here) that the average tenure of the chief customer officer is only 29.6 months. It's a relatively new position. It's only been around for about 11 years, I believe, is the earliest-known chief customer officer.
But the average tenure is only 29.6 months, and why is that?
The biggest reason why CCOs fail (and this is a lesson for you to take away from this) is the mismanagement of expectations as to how long it takes to generate this notion of customer centricity throughout the organization. It's not a quarterly basis. [To audience member.] You mentioned that it was 10 or 11 years for you at Hilton.
Jeb Dasteel is the chief customer officer of Oracle and the 2009 Chief Customer Officer of the Year. He spent three years building the foundation for this notion of customer centricity throughout the organization before he accepted the role of chief customer officer because he felt like he needed the organizational clout and the credibility coming into this role in order to be effective in his role.