By Curtis Bingham

Customers with the best experience generate 140% more revenue. Digital transformation enables greater customer engagement, and therefore greater revenue.

What is the business value of an improved customer experience? CEOs have never responded well when chief customer officers (CCOs) say “Trust me, this is the right thing to do.” In fact, the average tenure of a CCO is only 27 months (recent CCO Council research). Why is this so low? One reason is that some customer executives struggle to demonstrate quantifiable ROI for customer initiatives. When the CEO and CFO are making priority decisions they simply can’t compare the returns for investing in CX improvements with hiring another salesperson.  Or worse, when the company hits a revenue road bump, the CCO’s initiatives and sometimes even the CCO herself are the first to be cut because their value cannot be quantified.

According to research published in HBR by Medallia, customers with the highest CX scores generate 140% more revenue than those with the lowest.

Medallia examined in depth two companies, one transactional and one subscription based. Transactional companies typically measure return frequency and average spend per visit. Subscription-based companies typically measure duration of repeat business, typically through retention, cross-sell, and upsell. They examined customer feedback and experience scores at a point in time, and then actual behavior for the subsequent year. This is important, as one of the downfalls of NPS measurement is that it measures nebulous intent and not actual behavior.

After controlling for other factors that drive repeat purchases such as affinity or natural consumption cycles, Medallia found a strong correlation between CX and revenue. Revenue generated by each customer increased significantly with higher CX scores. The customers with the best past experiences generated 140% greater revenue than customers with the worst past experiences.

For the subscription business, customers having the poorest experience stood only a 43% chance of being a member a year later, and were only likely to remain a member for a little over a year. Conversely, those with the best experiences were 74% likely to remain a member a year later, and were likely to remain a member for six years.

Done right, digital transformation promises improved customer engagement, a better experience doing so, and decreased costs to serve. And that’s a compelling argument.

How are you demonstrating the ROI of your customer initiatives and CX programs to your CEO?

P.S. Next question: Would it be valuable to have a discussion about where you need to go next in your digital transformation?

I've created a comprehensive digital assessment that benchmarks against the world's leading companies in six critical dimensions and gives you a prioritized roadmap going forward. I've partnered with Bob Taylor, former CCO of Samsung SDS and present CDO of from.digital, a digital transformation agency to bring this to you.

If you'd like to discuss, please call me at 978-226-8675 or email curtis@ccocouncil.org.

By Curtis Bingham

A recent HBR article described a 2016 study examining the forecast rate of digital disruption. Executive search firm Russell Reynolds surveyed 2000 C-level executives in 15 industries, asking them to describe the expected rate of digital disruption during the coming 12 months.

Executives expect digital disruption to be the most severe in B2C industries, particularly in media. 57% of Technology execs expect moderate or massive digital disruption. My personal conversations with chief customer officers (CCOs) confirm that B2B industries are not far behind. Oracle, facing considerable pressure from SaaS providers and other competitors, recently moved 90% of their business to the cloud.

The research indicates that industries most vulnerable to digital disruption are those that have low barriers to entry and are comprised of large companies with legacy business models. Digitally agile competitors gain greater economies of scale and capture greater value by automating expensive processes. A recent McKinsey survey of 1,000 B2B decision makers said that approximately "86 percent of respondents said they prefer using self-service tools for reordering, rather than talking to a sales representative." Thus, many digitally agile competitors are providing self-service re-ordering and saving money while providing a better customer experience.

Where are you at? I'd love to hear how would you answer the same question: In your industry, what level of digital disruption are you expecting during the coming year: none, low, moderate, or massive?

P.S. Next question: would it be valuable to have a discussion about where you need to go next in your digital transformation?

I've created a comprehensive digital assessment that benchmarks against the world's leading companies in six critical dimensions and gives you a prioritized roadmap going forward. I've partnered with Bob Taylor, former CCO of Samsung SDS and present CDO of from.digital, a digital transformation agency to bring this to you.

If you'd like to discuss, please call me at 978-226-8675 or email curtis@ccocouncil.org.

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

Customer crises strike without warning, and the chief customer officer must act swiftly and decisively to address root causes and begin rebuilding damaged customer relationships. Over my years of experience working with scores of chief customer officers, I've found three steps that are crucial in successfully managing any crisis:

Build Strong Customer Insight Before Crisis Strikes
As owner of the customer you know the value of thorough customer research, but having detailed data is particularly vital when crisis strikes: your unique customer insight must form the basis of a successful response strategy. Relying on that insight you will be able to specifically target touch points that will resonate with your customers, identify areas of the organization's plan that may exacerbate negative opinion, and determine the best strategies for mitigating that negativity. Have a comprehensive customer research program in place before you're faced with crisis to ensure that the information is there when you need it most.

Focus the Organization on Customer Impact
It's all too common for the wider organization to focus on damage control-acting in self-defense, laying blame, or stonewalling. But this will only worsen already injured customer relationships. Instead, it's imperative for you to lead the organization to focus on customer impact at every step along the road to recovery. This is not to say that every action must have a positive impression; we know there are times the organization must act despite negative impact. Your job is to ensure that at every step someone is asking the question: how will this affect customers? If it's positive, highlight it in a way that strengthens customer relationships, and if it's negative, use your customer insight to mitigate the damage.

Rebuild Damaged Trust
Incorporating high customer touch into routine operations allows you to rebuild trust while creating sustainable customer centric change. Seek opportunities for reassuring customers not only within the recovery, but throughout the organization. Look for functions that can be updated or repackaged to highlight positive customer impacts. Share information with customers by updating call center scripts, or devise high touch outreach programs to provide understanding about particular actions or operations of the organization. Customer trust will return only when customers feel they are receiving honest and forthcoming communication about the problems affecting them and the steps you are taking toward resolution. 

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?