By Curtis Bingham

Last week, I described recent research conducted by the CCO Council into the impact of the chief customer officer on company financials. This week, I discuss the findings in detail and provide recommendations for managing them.

1. Customer Centricity is a two-year investment

Developing and improving customer strategy is a profitable but longer-term investment. It takes at least two years for the CCO's activities to flow through the company and make a significant impact on top- and bottom-line results. Once these results materialize, however, they appear to continue to grow commensurate with the investment. B2C industries tend to see results more rapidly than B2B. Industries with intense competition show heightened impact from the CCO.  

Recommendation: CEOs and Boards must commit from the outset to support and invest in the CCO and his/her initiatives for a minimum of two years to ensure the highest ROI. In turn, CCOs must manage the expectations of the CEO and Board to allow for this two-year probationary period. 

2. The CCO must show contribution to long-term revenue and profitability improvements 

Companies have demonstrated measurable improvements in revenues and profits while employing a CCO. In some cases, overall revenue drops after the CCO's departure. This research shows that the CCO can and should be accountable for improving top-and bottom-line results, although the impact may not be measurable on a quarterly basis.

Recommendation: CEOs should expect the CCO to provide, in addition to intermediate metrics, quantifiable impact on revenue and profits, and ensure the systems are in place to properly track the CCO's contribution. The CCO should begin by providing a clear line of sight from his or her actions to revenue and profitability. In some cases, the CEO and CCO may need to begin by agreeing upon an intermediate goal of driving loyalty and accept academic research proving that loyalty drives revenue and profit. However, this can only be temporary. 

3. In absence of growth, the CCO may help prevent a slide 

In some industries that experienced negative growth, the presence of the CCO helped stem the decline suffered through competitors and maintain revenues/profits through stronger customer relationships and trust.

Recommendation: The CCO must "bank" customer trust and loyalty to protect customers against hard times. CEOs need to take a less transactional view of activities that may pay dividends at a later date. 

4. Everyone says they are customer centric... 

Every company claims to be customer centric, but fewer actually are. Many publicly-stated company policies remain company centric rather than customer centric, and in the end, those whose actions are aligned with their customer needs are more successful.

Recommendation: The CCO should, with the support of the CEO, examine the policies, actions, and restrictions to ensure that customer needs are met on balance with business needs.

This study clearly shows one thing: CCO's are adding value to the bottom line. While growing steadily from fewer than 30 in 2003, CCOs are the newest, and by far the smallest, component of the C-suite. Many companies look at the CCO position and question if they can afford to add it to their C-Suite team, but the numbers turn that question on its head and ask how they can afford NOT to do so.  

Whether you are a company looking to create a CCO position or currently a CCO looking for resources, we invite to you to explore the CCO Council (www.ccocouncil.org) to give you and your company a true competitive advantage.

*This article is the second in a two-part series excerpted from The Impact of the CCO, available for free download from the CCO Council website here.

By Curtis Bingham

Customer engagement needs to be a disciplined strategy with ownership, accountability, broad reach, goals, accountability, measures, and a marketing plan of its own to communicate with employees, customers, and other stakeholders. Here are six essential components to a successful customer engagement strategy:

Purpose
In order to devise an effective strategy, you must first identify what you want engaged customers to do for you. Do you want them to help resolve problems, inspire innovation, co-develop new products or services, generate market insights, improve operational efficiency, enable greater sales velocity, or something else? You need a purpose to give your strategy focus.

Engagement Opportunities
What are the most important collaboration activities that support the engagement strategy? What are the most important advocacy activities that support the engagement strategy? How do you determine each activity’s importance and priority? Once identified, what resources do you have to support these activities?

Customer selection and enticement
How do you identify the ideal customers to participate in an activity that achieves your business goals? What opportunities are best suited to the customers and the pursuit of your goals? How do you entice customers to participate? For some, it’s simply a matter of asking. But others may need incentives or a clearly articulated mutual benefit that makes participation worth their discretionary time.

Measurement and impact on business metrics
You need to find a correlation between the measure of engagement by activity and its impact on the business. How do you measure engagement and how do you demonstrate that correlation? Without it, investment in your strategy is not defensible or sustainable.

Organizational alignment to customer direction
While it’s great if you have customers collaborating and advocating, if the organization is not aligned around delivering improvements or outcomes from these activities, engagement will be short lived. Customers will realize, “Oh, they’re asking me for help but they’re not really doing anything about it, therefore, it’s not worth the investment of my time and energy.” 

Employee engagement
Similar to the process of selecting customers, how do you identify the ideal employees to participate in an activity that achieves your business goals? What opportunities are best suited to the employees and the pursuit of your goals? How do you entice employees to participate? Rewards and incentives, both intrinsic and extrinsic, may be appropriate and necessary to successfully engage employees in the business of engaging customers.

By Curtis Bingham

Now that “tweet” has become a verb, it seems that everyone has a Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and any other alphabet soup social media account. And rabid social media “experts” are calling for every C-level executive to embrace social media as part of their “new commitment to transparency.” 

Who cares whether or not the CCO tweets? Is the CMO going to magically create brand evangelists in 140 characters? If the CFO posts a family vacation snapshot on the company blog is Wall Street going to raise earnings expectations?

I think not. While there are benefits, whether you choose to blog or personally participate in social media is irrelevant. However, there are four things CCOs need to be thinking about now with regards to this powerful phenomenon.

Customer monitoring
More and more of our customers are on social media and, with the proliferation of social media monitoring tools, we have at our fingertips a very rich and real-time view of customer (or end-user, as it may be for your business) needs, desires, and issues. Do we need yet another source of information about our customers? We might think not, but in truth, this source is far more immediate than sales reports, quarterly rolling surveys, or even post-interaction surveys. And because they are unsolicited, they are probably more accurate although sometimes far more inflammatory due to the inherent anonymity of the medium. Leverage the opportunity presenting itself and use it to mine information about customers, users, and even competitors and detractors. What might words said in pseudo-public tell you about private business strategy and direction that salespeople can leverage?

Triage and escalation avoidance
As we've seen over and over again, mistakes and mishaps can go viral in a heartbeat. FedEx did a wonderful job of responding within 48 hours to a security camera video of one of its drivers caught throwing a monitor over a customer's gate. In two days the video received more than 4 million views and 17,000 comments. The SVP of U.S. Operations issued a video and print response that was fantastic: apologizing, reiterating the true values of the company, detailing actions being taken, and reaching out to the offended customer. Every news article includes reference to his response, nearly nullifying the impact of the original misdeed. We have all spent significant time and energy creating in our companies elaborate, closed-loop triage and issue resolution processes for our customers in the call centers, sales channels, and at the executive level. We need to extend those processes to social media to discover problems and nip escalations before they become full-blown PR nightmares that damage our brand, loyalty, and profits.

Opportunity discovery
During the Super Bowl a couple of years ago, a number of customers were highly offended by Go Daddy's continuing borderline risqué advertisements and expressed their frustration with the obvious disconnect from their personal values along with their interest in changing domain hosts. An individual in Comcast's then-nascent social media monitoring group happened to be watching and offered them a special incentive to switch. There was a fair amount of business generated by this lucky catch. What opportunities can we find and shuttle to our sales teams?

Employee engagement
In addition to all the benefits, social media can be a legal nightmare, a PR disaster, or simply a venue in which customer trust can be damaged or destroyed. Make sure you provide customer-facing employees authorized to use social media channels on the company’s behalf with clear guidelines for appropriate, business-relevant social media behavior. Take advantage of the many new businesses that are emerging to help companies monitor and control how employees interact with customers using social media. Your objective should be to empower and leverage the enthusiasm of your employees to build trust, promote products and services, champion the brand, and foster productive customer relationships, while providing guidance and oversight to the creation of a consistent customer experience across all channels.

What are your thoughts? Who cares whether or not the CCO tweets?

By Curtis Bingham

Customer executives are regularly challenged to prove the value of their initiatives. To demonstrate value, executives must speak the language of business so as to allow business leaders to make comparisons and tradeoffs. Executives are primarily interested in increasing revenue, decreasing costs, and mitigating risk. To effectively demonstrate value, customer executives need to show how their customer initiatives impact one or more of these key factors. In my previous post I described the historical retrospective approach whereby incremental per-customer or per–segment revenue gains are correlated with increasing loyalty and engagement. Expected change in customer value is another valuable means of demonstrating ROI.

Many companies use lifetime customer value to justify marketing and customer acquisition efforts. Similarly, positive changes in lifetime value are a result of increased preference, decreased price sensitivity, increased consumption, and greater advocacy. Conversely, lifetime value plummets in response to negative experiences as consumption drops and referrals cease.

A number of years ago, JetBlue analyzed NPS results correlated with passenger behavior and found that each detractor converted to promoter is worth $40 additional profit and each 1-point overall NPS gain yields a $5-8M increase in annual revenue. Highly satisfied customers increase their use of ancillary services such as seat upgrades, box food purchases, etc. Converting a detractor to a promoter yields an additional $100-140 per customer annually, or the equivalent of another flight traveled each year plus ancillary service purchases. Conversely, negative word of mouth costs the company $104 per detractor per year in missed revenue: $72 in lost referrals and $32 in unpurchased ancillary services. 

Put another way, every 25 customers actively promoting JetBlue to friends, family, associates, and on social media equates to one new customer flying JetBlue, whereas only 16 detractors would dissuade an existing customer from flying.  By the same math, it might take 36,000 promoters to increase revenue by $1M, but only 14,000 detractors to realize a revenue loss of $1M.  Every customer value quantification effort must begin with a tangible understanding for each key segment of the length of average customer relationships, costs of new customer acquisition, average customer value, and retention rates. 

Enrich these data by examining how your most loyal and engaged customers within critical segments behave differently than your least engaged. Examine factors such as overall profitability, repeat purchase frequency and volume, longevity, share of wallet, breadth of product portfolio purchased (i.e. the ancillary services mentioned above), the number and value of new customers acquired through references and referrals provided each year. For many companies the annual value of these computations are significant and become even more so when extrapolated over the average lifetime of a customer. 

Similarly, the cost of dissatisfied customers can be computed to measure the cost of status quo.  What is the cost of each call into the call center? How many callbacks are required to address the same issue as a result of an inappropriate focus on average call handle time? What are the most common customer dissatisfiers and what does it cost to address them?  How many credits are being offered to correct billing mistakes?

Armed with tangible proof of the ROI of investments in customer centricity, customer executives can have meaningful conversations with top leadership, enabling them to compare such investments against other priorities and make the best decisions for the company. Without these measures, “doing the right thing” will only happen in the best of times and most certainly not in the worst of times when it is most needed.

By Curtis Bingham

A common challenge of chief customer officers and other customer executives is the need to prove the ROI of customer centricity. For better or for worse, business executives are primarily interested in increasing revenue, decreasing costs, and mitigating risk. To effectively demonstrate value, customer executives need to show how their customer initiatives impact one or more of these key factors.

One of the easiest and most powerful ways for customer executives to demonstrate value is to examine historical trends of loyalty and revenue/profits, especially for key customers. Assuming that you have a history of loyalty survey data (or even satisfaction survey data), correlate the incremental revenue (or better yet, if you have it, the incremental profit) of a customer with improving loyalty measures over time. Some local improvements may be due to a change in customer leadership or an improved sales relationship, making it necessary to examine multiple customers in aggregate and by segment. Start with the key accounts, as these accounts are supposedly enjoying the greatest attention and perhaps unwittingly becoming the most loyal.

It may also be helpful to examine the opposite; what is the incremental loss as loyalty erodes? If you plot for each of your customers their revenue (or profits) and their loyalty score over time and notice a downward trend, the negative proves the loyalty-profit correlation in reverse, and elevates the opportunity for increasing investment to stop the bleeding.

There may not be perfect correlations. Satisfaction and loyalty are subjective measures of an emotional state and although loyalty correlates well with increased revenue it isn’t as strong as customer engagement, which measures actual customer behavior. As well, without concerted efforts across the board, some of your employees or processes may be destroying the loyalty you are working so hard to create and measure. 

Are there holes in the customer or loyalty data? Do you have loyalty information from end users but not decision-makers? Or poor loyalty survey participation? How about poor participation by certain key accounts? Or worse, an inability to measure revenue/profit of an individual customer or segment? Spend some time filling these holes in your data and analytics capability so you can conduct this analysis again in the following quarter. 

In examining historical correlations in this fashion, JetBlue found that a one-point improvement in their overall NPS score equates to between five and seven million dollars in additional revenue. The goal isn’t necessarily to prove that a specific customer initiative will raise revenue by 30 basis points. Instead, the goal is to show an upward trend correlating increasing loyalty with increasing revenue/profits. Demonstrating this trend and correlation is a significant step for CCOs in proving the ROI of customer centricity, which validates the need for additional investment in activities to drive loyalty and customer engagement.