Businesses are investing in customer-centric leadership roles like chief customer officers and chief experience officers to drive growth and retention, but the position alone isn’t enough.
For CCOs and CXOs, delivering tangible customer experience improvements requires some essential ingredients, including CEO buy-in, organization-wide involvement and customer centricity.
The remit of the two roles is similar, with the CCO tending to focus on customer satisfaction and loyalty, while the CXO zeroes in on customer interactions and the customer lifecycle.
The roles started to emerge around 2005 as businesses looked to prioritize customer relationships, according to Shari Srebnick, principal analyst at Forrester. Interest in these roles continues to grow as companies place more weight on customer satisfaction and retention as a growth driver.
“As companies recognize the need to become customer centric and shift from sales-only growth to having a stronger focus on customer retention … the CCO role has become more prominent,” Srebnick said via email. “Companies are adopting these roles because they’ve realized the importance of retention. It isn’t, and can’t be, solely about net new business.”
Rather than focusing solely on customer satisfaction, CCO and CXO roles now play a strategic role in aligning CX across departments, encompassing a range of responsibilities that tie back to the customer.
Reflecting this shift, Alicia Skubick’s role with global review hosting platform Trustpilot expanded from chief marketing officer into chief customer officer.
A strong advocate for the position, Skubick’s remit now includes consumer and business experiences, customer support and marketing and communications. It’s been an opportunity to shape the role with a strategic mindset at the start.
“It was important to establish what it means to be responsible for the customer experience, and I've built out the roadmap for that,” Skubick said.
As a professional exercise to compare different types of brands, Skubick signed up with digital bank Monzo to understand its approach to customer centricity and what could be applied in her role as Trustpilot’s customer champion.
She found that the seamless onboarding, simple, intuitive digital interface, and thoughtful surprise and delight campaigns all added up to a standout customer experience.
“Monzo really understands who their ideal customer profile is, works hard to appeal to specific segments of the market and also throws in little delights,” she said.
It reinforced her belief that it’s critical to apply a customer experience lens to all parts of the business.
A customer champion in name only?
While having a customer champion declares the importance of customer centricity, it needs to be more than name only.
“All too often, a CCO is hired, given a minimal amount of influence, some resources and a small bit of authority, but not enough needed to impact any real change,” Srebnick said.
She warned that one person or role cannot pivot the entire ship without influence, resources and the power to impact major change.
“It’s extremely difficult to do this without full support of the CEO and board. They can’t just be a figurehead with a fancy title,” Srebnick said.
Having executive buy-in, especially from the CEO, has helped Skubick’s mission to prioritize customer experience across Trustpilot’s business because it’s supported from the top.
“The CEO needs to really believe it, breathe it and love it, and I’m fortunate to have that,” she said.
As part of this journey, the company recognized that its stated values were missing a customer component. To reflect its signature importance, the first of its five values is now to prioritize the customer.
“It embeds it into the culture of our business and also reminds our employees to really make it a part of their day to day,” she said.
Avoiding the pitfalls of CX silos
Skubick has worked to embed customer-centric thinking across the business to drive meaningful customer engagement. It was a methodical approach to empower teams to own customer experience initiatives and connect customer experience to business outcomes.
Skubick has been mindful to avoid the CCO role becoming a barrier to existing initiatives and siloing customer experience within her role. She created small working groups built around employees to harness their passion and commitment to customers throughout the business.
“We didn’t want to stamp out any organic customer sentiment or work that was happening,” she said.
Adopting a similar approach, Todd Kisaberth, chief customer officer at Certinia, a provider of enterprise resource planning and customer success software, aims to prioritize customer experience across all parts, not just with the CCO role.
“Having this role doesn’t take away the need to really service our customers across the entire company,” said Kisaberth.
To help integrate customer experience across the organization, initiatives need to align with the customer journey and avoid the trap of customer operations mirroring internal business units, he said.
By laying out the steps customers take and evaluating the stages of that journey, CX leaders can identify how different units can support or improve that experience, according to Kisaberth.
“You can then consider if you’re focused on the right things. But if you don't start with the journey, you won’t get the strongest impact,” he said.
Connecting the data dots to deliver business growth
To optimize and improve processes that lead to growth, CCO and CXO roles must be laser focused on outcomes, which requires a strong foundation in data.
“They need to understand what’s being built, who it’s being built for and how it’s being brought to market. All of these tie into how you deliver for the customer,” Srebnick said.
Customer experience initiatives need to be informed by a full 360-degree view of customers. This requires access to all relevant customer information, being able to aggregate it and make sense of it, according to Kisaberth.
While mature CX practices are very different from they were 10 years ago when Kisaberth started in a CCO role, data fragmentation can undermine the goal of having a unified understanding of the business.
“The solutions to help support these kinds of functions are dramatically more advanced and the management of data is more sophisticated,” Kisaberth said.
He cites Apple and Amazon as leaders in customer experience that lean heavily into data, while telecommunication services and insurance companies tend to lag behind in their CX priorities.
Drilling into data helps to prioritize customer centricity across the businesses, something that he is championing as the vital ingredient.
“In this role, you're trying to get a full view of your customers so you can really understand their challenges and the opportunities for improvement,” he said.
