I recently read Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine by Jeanne Bliss. Here is a brief review.
This is the second edition of the Chief Customer Officer book. The first edition was published in 2006. I read the first one after meeting Jeanne at the CXPA Member Insights meeting in 2011. It was a very useful book. If you judge how useful a book is by the number of sticky notes you add, well, let’s just say this one was a useful book. I appreciated the idea of the working across silos to create an end-to-end experience. This is something I have been advocating for years. Jeanne provides the idea of identifying the organizations ‘Power Core’ as a way to craft an organization-wide CX approach. If you know which part of the business is the key driver, you may be able to identify better methods and measurements to get the organization aligned. You might modify your approach with an organization that is sales oriented vs one that is engineering oriented.
The 2.0 version also got a lot of sticky notes. It has been significantly updated. I found it much easier to read and there are some really great new ideas.
One new idea is to unite the leadership team around the ‘right to earn growth’. By using a key and simple metric focused on customer retention, the organization can align its efforts to delivering experiences that customers find valuable. The measurement seems simple. Identify how many customers are staying with your business, how many new customers you get and how many customers leave. The net is a retention score that indicates how loyal customers are to your business. Keeping customers should be a more effective strategy than continuously having to seek new customers. This metric highlights your ability to retain customers. If many are leaving, it provides the opportunity to align experience improvements so that the whole organization is focused on the same goal.
One big change since the first book was published is the emergence of Social Media as an experience listening tool that can help an organization better understand its customers. Social media has provided a way to have a powerful, real-time voice of the customer. Along with surveys and other tools, it is another way to focus the organization on understanding the customer and their needs from an outside-in perspective.
What has changed is the power that social media has given customers to speak out about their experiences. I am supremely enthused about this forcing function! Lagging survey metrics can’t catch surges of happiness and unhappiness that customers express in social media to make an impact on customer growth and profitability. And the cherry-picked silo-based projects that emerge from these results are not solving the problems causing customers to depart or grow.
Based on years of experience, Jeanne provides a great framework for understanding how customer experience efforts work or don’t work. She provides useful insights into what it takes to get a leadership team aligned. And, she provides an approach for prioritizing and staging customer experience work so that improvements can continue through initiatives that can often take several years to deliver.
Jeanne advocates customer journey mapping as a tool to understand how the customer experiences the organization. This gets everyone focused on what the customer experiences and values rather than focusing only on what the business values.
Sustainable change will occur only when this work goes beyond project plans and status updates and is grounded in caring about customer’s lives. Jeanne Bliss
If you are interested in learning more about what it actually takes to improve the experiences delivered by a large organization, Chief Customer Officer 2.0 is the book to read.
I would love to hear your thoughts. Have you read Chief Customer Officer? Let’s keep the conversation going. Leave a post here or connect with my on Twitter @XDstrategy
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