Of all there lies the customers head, Chief Customer Officer (CCO) who is one among the C suites of the departments to deliver the customer success. Handling difficult customer interactions by offering the best customer experience is part of their deal. Want to know what this role has to offer to the organization? Let’s learn about this C suite position a bit!
How did the position come into existence?
It was this pandemic that spotted the light on the question, as to “How to grow and secure the existing customers?” When they had to secure the revenue, working on the existing customers was the only goal!
Taking them through the best customer experience became the priority. And hence, the need for a chief customer officer (CCO) came into existence.
Suggested Read: The Ultimate Guide to Being a Customer Success Manager
Why do you need a Chief customer officer in the organization?
- To bring a competitive advantage: He is focused, and detailed in the groundwork to raise the organization and get the teams going in this objective.
- Brings in loyal customers: They are the ones who work on long-lasting relationships, and engage the customers to make repeat purchases ensuring they are happy and satisfied!
- Unraveling the issues: Going to the roots of the problem to solve is the true solution and they ensure to get there to find a resolution.
- Managing customer-facing roles: Makes sure to monitor not just the customer success team but also the customer-facing roles.
- Evolution of a culture: Without a proper culture it’s implausible to drive flawless success and establish customer experience. Chief customer officer builds and changes the culture as required.
The traits needed in a chief customer officer
Awareness of the know-how of the organization.
They are involved in changing the culture and driving all the leaders to work in the approach set by them. So it takes all the skills to be a change-maker. The skills associated are, to be a good interpreter of the organization regarding the customer experience, identifying the barriers that reside, planning out what the leaders have to do to be a part.
The vision that sets the business on track.
A vision should be such that the customers have a clear picture to understand where the organization is heading towards. Where it is in alignment with the culture, business strategy, and values with the support of the senior leadership.
An Influencer who gets other functions involved!
The idea is to have a sense of brand building. The customer experience comes with the support of all the functions and not just one. So they have to influence all the functions. Should be aware of how a customer experience can enhance the ability to sell more. Also, how it can aid the product development team to develop a better product? How does it help the customer success team to upsell?
A person who listens!
In building a great system, it’s crucial to listen to what customers are saying. Understand the processes already in place and from where the feedback is coming. If something is already existing knowing how to enhance it better or if it doesn’t, one has to reinvent!
Tracks storytelling metrics…
Should be sound in using the data to tell a better story of the customers. By using transactional information, sentimental, loyalty, and leverage relationship insights as well. Moreover, identifying the right metrics that work well for the organization.
What does a Chief Customer Officer do?
Delivering the greatest value to the customer!
- It starts with determining what the customers value, to make sense of the customer experience to be delivered.
- And then comes the time for segmenting the customers you’d want to invest in.
- Understanding where to invest to establish the right system of process on impacting the higher value contacts.
- Later comes down to defining the customer experience and setting up a common medium to reach out to all the customers.
Sets the work process to carry in the organization.
- Connects the teams to work together rather than working separately.
- Aligns the cross-functional operations in the customer success process.
- Imbibes the changes if any and setting a disciplined action to fulfill the process.
Holds accountable for driving partnerships with all the leaders.
- Developing the implementation methodology with thorough research to understand the return on investment and customer loyalty.
- Teaming up with leaders to track the metrics for every interaction across the channels and reporting it.
- Driving accountability and knowing when and from whom to get it done.
- Working towards bringing a customer-centric culture is another main focus.
Lays out the customer success metrics to track!
- The CCO tracks the complaints lodged to assess the main driving reasons of the issues to put the teams to work on it.
- Gathers the necessary data from the surveys to discover the ultimate truth of the pros and cons of the system to make room for improvisation.
- Creates a united platform for interpreting the customers from a better standpoint and to take the action on it.
KPI hacks a Chief Customer Officer looks into!
Net revenue retention vs logo retention.
Net Revenue Retention also referred to as NRR in short calculates the revenue over a year that includes, downgrades, upgrades, and lost revenue.
On the other end, in Logo Retention (Customer Retention) the catch here is to consider the customer count over the year regardless of the revenue brought by the customers.
Why do you have to compare the metrics?
It is solely upon the industry you belong to and the balance in the difference of how adding a new customer and expanding the existing customer will impact the revenue of the business.
The whole groundwork is in seeing the revenue ultimately. If the firm was able to make 1.2 B compared to the previous month which was 1 B having 50% logo retention, it is still great work. Because it could manage to keep 50% customer satisfied and it represents the company grew along with them! This means it could double the revenue with low logo retention.
But in the case of different industries, adding new customers may increase the revenue, and expansion of existing customers may not work. So it’s better to keep the balance between the two metrics so that your efforts to bring the revenue are lesser and consistent.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) vs Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
The revenue made by the business from the customer over the period of their lifetime is Customer Lifetime Value. The cost a company incurs while acquiring a customer is the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
For sustainable valuation, estimating the cost of the customer for their lifetime and comparing it with the investment made in acquiring or retaining the customer aids in forecasting the profit you could make and the time to make it.
So there is a need to increase CLTV and it depends on how you make the expansions and keep the pricing models.
Customer Health Score
The process of evaluating the customer satisfaction, overall engagement, and renewal possibilities that indicates the score by flagging it with red, yellow, and green colors helps in assessing the health of the customer accounts.
The brand perception has already begun from the time they found you and went to the demo and finally got the product, even before the customer success came into play. It later starts with the relationship maintained by the customer success teams.
So let the customer health score depict the efforts put by every department in having that customer survive in business with you. And understand who impacts the most.
Net Promotor Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) tells about the likeliness of your customers recommending your products to other likely potential buyers. Regardless of what surveys you conduct, it’s left to you, how you fetch data and respond back to your customers. Looking into the data of how satisfied customers are, is crucial for your business and helps to understand if your brand is liked by the users or not to an extent that they recommend it to others.
Challenges the CCO faces
- Many firms do not consider Customer centricity as a strategic competitive advantage yet. And, it’s hard to make the CEO get to that point.
- The CCO has to earn the authority by delivering value and leveraging this authority doesn’t come easy.
- There is hardly any knowledge available in understanding the resources required to convert the firm into a customer-centric organization.
- On may struggle in coming up with an effective strategy, but not as easy as it is to gather data and be a voice of the customers.
- Implementing cultural change isn’t an easy catch because as resistant the human remains to change, difficult it is to get them to stick but may come with penalties and rewards to create that engagement.
- The reason for the role being fragile is to understand the behavior and emotion of the customer and it is a solely incomprehensible thing to just get it right.
The salary of a Chief Customer Officer
With the growing demand ever after the pandemic, an organization has understood the value of growing the company and needs a chief customer officer to handle the system right with the fellow teams working towards one goal to satisfy customers.
Here is the average salary of a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) globally.
| Location | Australia | India | UK | US |
| Salary | A$1,50,000 | INR 27,71, 877 | £1,07,406 | $2,01,536 |
All in all!
A chief customer officer not just solves the issues, develops a competitive advantage, plans the strategy that keeps the business profitable, and focuses on retaining the customers.
They must be the ones who understand the customers better than the customer themselves. To get there, knowing their opinions, thoughts, and needs are the places to take a note on! Reaching here isn’t easy but comes with experience over years.
To get your customers to advocate for using your product comes with a good customer experience and to lay a customer experience, you’d need a customer success tool for the organization to set the success right! So, do try it!
