By Curtis Bingham

Introduction 

A major airline found their internal customer satisfaction ratings dropping. A VP, not entirely jokingly, said, “Send all the flight attendants to charm school!”

Charm school isn’t the answer. Unless you work for the DMV, employees typically WANT to do what is right for the customer. But often, internal policies and procedures are tying their hands.

What gets in the way of your employees serving and delivering greater customer value?

In the early days of Jeb’s tenure at Oracle, he found that employees desperately wanted to solve customers’ problems. But they didn’t always know which ones to focus on first and didn’t have a meaningful way to do so.

How can you engage employees in reducing customer friction and creating greater customer value?

Customer Performance

For the past few months, we’ve been writing about Customer Performance. We’ve created a comprehensive framework as a way to look at customers as your most essential asset: to systematically create value for them, and in turn, motivate them to be great brand advocates for you. The Customer Performance Framework systematically moves customers toward the realization of their objectives and towards advocacy of your brand. A Customer Performance focus engages employees to engage with customers in delivering greater customer value.

Employee Engagement

Do free lunches, pool tables, or afternoon keggers drive employee engagement? No, these perks are great for recruiting. But they are easily habituated and ultimately have no impact on employee behavior.

Doshi & McGregor  wrote that the most potent employee motivators are  Play ,  Purpose , and  Potential .  Play  is when  the enjoyment of  the work itself provides the motivation to do the work.  Purpose  is fulfilled when we value the impact   or outcome of the work. And  Potential  is when we value the second-order outcome of the work—we do the work because it will eventually lead to something very important to us.

Sadly, most employers resort to applying  Emotional Pressure  as they use guilt and shame to compel employees to work. Or they use  Economic Pressure  as they set up compensation systems where employees act solely to win an award or avoid a punishment. Or the culture is one of  Inertia , and deviation is punished.

These latter three sources of motivation are entirely disconnected from the work itself. However, according to Doshi & McGregor, “ identity  turns jobs into callings; it unites your team with a  common objective , behavioral code, heritage, and traditions.”

Like Jeb found at Oracle, we need to provide opportunities to connect employees with customers and direct their intrinsic desire to serve customers.

Engaging Employees in your Ease of Doing Business Efforts

It has been our experience that front-line employees tend to know and feel what frustrates their customers and would love nothing more than to fix it. Similarly, back-office employees feel their disconnect from customers acutely and are hugely motivated by learning how their actions impact customers and understanding how they’re making a difference for customers.

Following a merger or acquisition, there is often a massive effort to integrate customers into the new systems, contracts, support, etc. This effort is a phenomenal and often overlooked opportunity to get employees from both companies engaged in a compelling shared goal. You can be very targeted about which employees you engage with, to build enthusiasm and purpose consistent with Doshi & McGregor’s model above.

Ease of Doing Business means creating process efficiencies that allow our employees to spend more time on real value-add activities that matter. How many employees know precisely what constitutes a great experience? Effort, however, is intuitive. Employees often know precisely how to make it easy for customers to do business with us.

Where can we engage employees in our efforts to increase Ease of Doing Business?

Identify the Ease of Doing Business Hotspots

The first and easiest is to help identify the Ease of Doing Business Hotspots along the customer journey. Front-line employees often feel their customer’s pain acutely. And you would be surprised by how valuable the back-office employees (legal, accounts payable, contracts, accounts receivable, etc.) are.

Odds are, if a process is cumbersome for front-line employees, it’s tough for customers as well. Improved employee experience almost always translates into an improved customer experience. But not always the other way around. And that’s because frequently organizations paper-over problems and cause more difficult employee experiences in an attempt to improve the customer experience. So, there’s an argument for starting with the employee experience and asking if that’s been improved.

Prioritizing Ease of Doing Business Hotspots

After identifying the Hotspots that cause customer friction and impair revenue/profits, we want to prioritize them based on how easy and inexpensive it would be to implement fixes versus the positive impact those fixes will have on customers and your employees. Employees can be invaluable in identifying hotspots that are easy to fix, inexpensive, and highly impactful to both customers and employees. You should tackle these first. We want quick wins that help us gain peer and executive support for future projects. Even more importantly, this involvement will increase the level of employee enthusiasm and engagement you will need to go after more substantial projects.

Root Cause Analyses

As we embark on our journey to resolve the most critical Ease of Doing Business Hotspots, we need to engage process owners and front-line employees to help us perform root cause analyses. Employees typically understand the upstream nuances that result in significant issues downstream. Because they often acutely feel customer pain, they can enumerate the underlying issues that, if resolved, will ensure your solutions effectively reduce customer effort and make you easier to do business with.

Change Management Imperatives

The greatest strategies and action plans are useless without engaged employees. Countless Chief Customer Officers have failed because they cannot communicate their vision and convince employees to come with them on their change journey. 

Before embarking on each change management effort, you should consider critical success factors for change management. What are some of the risks or obstacles you expect to encounter? Who will help pave over those risks and help overcome political obstacles? 

Are there resources or capabilities that you don’t have within your group or even your company? 

How will your employees be involved in creating success? How will you include them in the analysis, development, measurement? 

Which employees do you need on your team? How will you convince them to participate in your efforts?

Summary

We cannot implement our grand challenges and plans without our employees truly onboard and committed.

According to  Gallup , only 33.1% of employees are actively engaged at work. Often, they lack direction and purpose. We have to create opportunities to engage them in increasing customer performance. We need to provide them formal opportunities to help solve customer problems.

If we’re successful, they’ll engage, and according to Gallup, companies with engaged employees drive 21% higher profitability and 20% higher sales. We’ll sign up for that.

Until next time,

Curtis Bingham & Jeb Dasteel

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

Where does your company stand on customers? Does the voice of the customer make its way up the executive level and influence strategic direction? Have you determined that you need a C-Level position dedicated to creating a customer experience and driving customer strategy throughout the organization? If you don't know or have had concerns regarding these important questions, then it might be time to consider adding a chief customer officer (CCO) to your C-Suite.

One cannot just post a job listing and hope for the best. In this case, the lack of a standard definition of the roles and responsibilities of the CCO creates hiring challenges for CEOs and Boards of Directors. Additionally key characteristics of successful CCOs are still emerging. In order to create the right career path, it is critical for the CCO to understand what is needed to be successful. CEOs and Boards of Directors should use these characteristics as part of hiring criteria.

The CCO is the company's change agent and as such spends most of his or her efforts "selling" customer centricity. The ability to influence both internal and external stakeholders is the single most important characteristic of the CCO. The CCO spends her or his time convincing others that changes being proposed will positively affect the success of the company. Until the CCO has a track record of achievements, the ability to influence others will determine the ability to increase revenue and profitability.

Skills
Above all else, the CCO must have leadership skills, including the ability to influence others. Confronted with limited resources and some skepticism it is critical that the CCO be action oriented, have analytic skills to evaluate data, make conclusions, and turn them into programs. Negotiating agreement on initiatives requires good listening skills; solutions must be collaboratively developed in order to ensure buy-in across the organization. The CCOs' advocacy for the consumer must be unwavering. Putting the customer front and center while balancing fiscal responsibility will keep the CCO focused on his/her mission.

Experience
When asked what experience a CCO should possess, one of the most successful CCOs stated that her broad understanding of business, especially operations, is her greatest asset. It gives her credibility and the ability to identify opportunities for customer improvements. Often organizations promote the "head of customer service" into the CCO role and while that individual may know customer service it is only a small part of creating a customer centric organization.

Personality and Fit
A critical criterion for CCOs is personality and how it fits within the culture or the desired culture of the organization. At the executive level of the corporation, CCOs must be able to leave their egos at the door. Collaboration with colleagues and department heads and the ability to influence them will be critical to success. Strong-arming or using Positional or Borrowed Authority will marginalize even the best formed programs. This collaborative approach must be balanced with the ability to project a strong presence and authority. The reality is that until the CCO is able to "demonstrate value" there are skeptics who will constantly challenge the role of CCO. A CCO must be "thick skinned," able to de-personalize the skepticism, and defend a position that may not be popular or have negative short term financial implications. For example, if a product release is known to have significant flaws, the CCO must be willing to delay the release even though it may result in a negative cash flow.

C-Suite executives and board members must carefully consider the characteristics of the successful CCO. The key is not to just put a warm body in the position with a goal of driving customer strategy. Careful consideration of personality and skill sets with reasonable expectations and timelines will put a new CCO in a position for success. Without incorporating the characteristics discussed above the potential for hiring the right person diminishes.

*This article is excerpted from The Bingham Advisory: Eight Imperatives for the Chief Customer Officer, available for free download from the CCO Council website here.

By Curtis Bingham

CCO tenure often falls casualty to the "Results right now!" syndrome that ignores a critical fact: like great wine, strong relationships take time to develop and grow more profitable with age. Many of these relationships cannot take root without a strategic plan to transmit the voice of the customer into the c-suite, thereby positioning the company to succeed and the CCO to thrive. Based on my ten years of work with more than 150 CCOs, here are seven critical success factors that will ensure CCOs meet or exceed strategic plans for their careers and for their customers.

Authoritative title and reporting structure: Title and reporting structure of the CCO are powerful signals of the company's commitment to customer centricity. The successful customer executive will have the title of CCO and report to the CEO or to an individual no more than one level below the CEO (e.g., chief marketing officer, chief operating officer, etc.).

Unwavering executive support: Continuous, vocal, and visible support from the CEO, the board, and the c-suite is critical to growth and stability for the CCO. The leadership team cannot abdicate involvement in customer centricity just because the company hired a CCO.

Earned Authority: Above and beyond positional authority derived from the job title and borrowed authority derived from the explicit, visible support of the CEO, CCOs must earn authority and credibility of their own. They do so by leading peers, executives, and employees to recognize how customer insight and customer centricity can be valuable aids in achieving their business goals.

Alignment with the CEO: By aligning priorities with the CEO and the rest of the c-suite, CCOs secure visibility at the highest level of the company and maintain involvement in key strategic corporate decisions.

Metrics that tie customer centricity to revenue growth and profitability: It is critical for CCOs to correlate customer centric programs to revenue growth and profitability, as challenging as that may be. There is growing evidence that customer loyalty and degree of customer engagement are tied to revenue. CCOs must lead their companies to determine and validate the evidence for themselves.

Support from internal and external allies: Without the support of peers, community leaders, industry analysts, and the customer, CCO initiatives will have limited results and impact. Critical to the future of the CCO is developing these alliances and being explicit about defining and communicating successes.

Compensation commensurate with customer centricity: All executives and senior leaders should have customer measures (e.g. satisfaction, loyalty) as part of their Management by Objectives (MBO). As part of this process, CCOs need to lead managers to recognize the impact their department has on customers and customer centricity.

These critical success factors are guideposts on your path to realizing your career goals as a CCO. Create a plan around those goals and use these success factors as self-evaluation criteria to maintain focus and improve your chances for success.

*This article is excerpted from The Bingham Advisory: Eight Imperatives for Chief Customer Officers, available for free download from the CCO Council website here.

By Curtis Bingham

Borrowed Authority is that which is borrowed from others with greater influence. It is best gained through the strong, vocal, and very visible support of the CEO. The more prominently the CEO advocates for the CCO and reinforces customer-centric imperatives, the ber the halo-effect and the greater the influence the CCO has over the organization. Borrowed Authority is imperative in the early days of the CCO’s tenure as any culture naturally resists change. The voice and Authority of the CEO is often necessary to overcome organizational inertia and enable a more complete customer-centric transformation. Leveraged correctly, this halo effect can be used to gain significant early momentum.

Here follow five strategies to increase your Borrowed Authority.

Align Priorities Alignment with CEO and board priorities is one key to Borrowed Authority. This gets and keeps your seat at the CEO’s table. The successful CCO shows a clear “line of sight” between customer activities and CEO priorities, demonstrating how customer centricity will enable success in meeting CEO objectives. Initiatives so aligned are more easily supported and promoted by the CEO.

Obtain clear direction (particularly at the outset) as to the objectives and measures the board and CEO are applying to the CCO role. In so doing, CCOs not only design their own agenda to best impact the company’s evaluation of their performance, but also inform the board, CEO, and peers of the shared purpose and need for collaboration.

Engage Executives Successful CCOs recognize that they cannot be the only ones championing the customer cause and refuse to allow the CEO or other executives to abdicate responsibility for understanding, serving, and actively engaging customers in growing the business. The most important way to engage executives is to make the voice of the customer roar through the C-suite. Every strategic decision should include the discussion, “What is the impact on the customer?” If the impact is positive, the strategic initiative should be promoted heavily. If it is negative, ways to mitigate the negative impact should be examined.

Speak the Language of Business An important way to borrow Authority is to speak the language of business. The CEO deals in revenue opportunity, ROI, hard cost, opportunity cost—but often finds loyalty or satisfaction scores as a strategic measure to be unfamiliar. At a minimum, the CCO should show how customer centricity can facilitate or accelerate executive goals. Better yet, the CCO should correlate customer value and the dollar cost of changes in loyalty scores with hard data such as revenue opportunities, cost savings, market penetration, share of wallet, and risk measures that the CEO, CFO and other fellow executives use to measure success.

The most successful CCOs are effective in championing hard metrics over the intangible, creating the business case for customer loyalty in terms of revenue opportunities and hard costs that are easily compared with competing priorities.

Create and Leverage Opportunities for CEO Support It is in the CEO’s best interest for the CCO to be successful. Yet, many CEOs and other executives are unaware of the best ways to demonstrate support for CCO activities. CCOs must create opportunities for CEOs and other executives to show support and leverage these activities fully. To solicit and leverage CEO support:

Use the CEO to Blow Up Obstacles When diplomacy fails in the face of “not invented here” or other irrational resistance to customer success, it may simply be necessary to leverage the CEO to blow up such obstacles. One CCO said that it took three years to consolidate employees with the same function from disparate departments. A CEO mandate would have resolved these roadblocks within weeks, saving customers three years of frustration. CEOs occasionally need to clarify or reset executive priorities around customer centricity, either directly through a mandate and personal charge or indirectly through MBOs and bonus plans.

Executives without strong Borrowed Authority report spending nearly 50% of their time justifying their existence and soliciting support, instead of serving customers. Increasing Authority to solve customer issues, drive customer centricity, and thereby create sustainable business growth needs to be a core strategy of every CCO who doesn’t wish to relegate the tenure of his/her role to chance. The Bingham CCO Authority Model is a powerful tool for guiding your strategy to gain and increase power and influence within your organization.

*This article is the second in a three-part series excerpted from The Bingham Advisory: Powerful Influence on Customer Centricity, available for free download here.

By Curtis Bingham

Authority is the currency of the C-Suite. Greater Authority means greater ability to influence the organization to take a desired action. But even as direct reports to the CEO, customer loyalty executives may be challenged to obtain the Authority needed to get the job done. Because they typically do not own all customer-facing resources they must lead by influence to effectively resolve customer issues or enhance the end-to-end customer experience and ultimately increase revenue and profits. There are three types of Authority for the CCO or other customer executive: Positional, Earned, and Borrowed Authority.

Every CCO or loyalty executive has some Authority derived from the position and title they hold within the organizational hierarchy. Using Positional Authority the CCO can point to his or her direct reports and say, “make it so” in order to address specific customer issues. In order to grant sufficient Positional Authority, the CCO is ideally positioned as a direct report to the CEO or perhaps one level below with a strong dotted line to the CEO. Title is crucial in granting Authority, inviting respect, and opening doors to influence other executives and departments to solve cross-boundary customer challenges (see The Bingham Advisory: 8 Strategic Imperatives for the CCO available at the CCO Council website). After the initial bump in influence following the appointment to the role, Positional Authority tends to be static and may even wane over time unless increased through a promotion. 

Borrowed Authority is that which is borrowed from others with greater influence. It is best gained through the strong, vocal, and very visible support of the CEO. The appointment of a loyalty executive tells the organization, including peers within the C-Suite: “Customer centricity is our strategic imperative.” The more prominently the CEO advocates for the CCO and reinforces customer-centric imperatives, the stronger the halo-effect and the greater the influence the CCO has over the organization. As the CEO of Nationwide said when he introduced newly appointed Chief Customer Advocate, Jasmine Green, to his organization, “This is Jasmine. She speaks for me.” Executives without strong Borrowed Authority report spending nearly 50% of their time justifying their existence and soliciting support instead of serving customers.

Borrowed Authority is imperative in the early days of the CCO’s tenure as any culture naturally resists change. The voice and Authority of the CEO is often necessary to overcome organizational inertia and enable a more complete customer-centric transformation. Leveraged correctly, this halo effect can be used to gain significant early momentum. Borrowed Authority may be strong in the early days but tends to wane as the attention of the CEO turns to other initiatives. If the drop is precipitous, the CCO can be rendered ineffective. Thus, while leveraging both Positional and Borrowed Authority, it is critical for CCOs to develop Earned Authority.

Earned Authority is the most powerful and sustainable Authority that can be wielded within the C-Suite and the organization, but it is the hardest won and typically in the shortest supply in the earliest days of CCO tenure. This is the type of Authority that comes with results. It is earned as the CCO leads peers, executives, and employees to recognize how customer insight and customer centricity can be valuable aids in achieving their own business, department, and personal goals. It is earned as CCO-led initiatives are seen to be successful both internally and externally. Because Earned Authority can grow over time, it eclipses all other forms of Authority. It is the strongest and most powerful form of Authority, and wielded correctly, can also enhance Positional and Borrowed Authority in a virtuous upwards cycle. The most successful executives with the longest tenure quickly earn this type of Authority.

Increasing Authority to solve customer issues, drive customer centricity, and thereby create sustainable business growth needs to be a core strategy of every CCO who doesn’t wish to relegate the tenure of his/her role to chance. Using the Bingham CCO Authority Model, you can gain, increase, and leverage your power and influence over your organization on three fronts at once.  

*This post is the first in a three-part series excerpted from The Bingham Advisory: Powerful Influence on Customer Centricity, available for free download here.