What the heck is a Chief Customer Officer?
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More companies are adding a Chief Customer Officer (CCO).
It sounds like a positive development, but you're not alone if you don't know exactly what a CCO does. I'll admit—I had to do some digging myself.
Thankfully, two experts gave me the inside scoop.
Customer experience pioneer and bestselling author, Jeanne Bliss, literally wrote the book on this topic. The book, Chief Customer Officer 2.0, spells out in great detail the role of the CCO.
Judy Weader is a senior analyst at Forrester who researches the field of customer experience (CX). You can find her quoted in publications like Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.
In this post, I'll attempt to answer a few questions with help from Bliss and Weader:
What does a Chief Customer Officer do?
Does a CCO need to have functional responsibility?
What’s the difference between a CCO and a CXO?
Is the CCO role a fad or a real trend?
How do you know if your company needs a CCO?
What does a Chief Customer Officer do?
"The Chief Customer Officer is responsible for building and guiding an organization’s customer experience strategy," explained Weader.
Customer experience extends beyond just customer service. It extends to all the interactions a customer has with your brand, including advertising, sales, delivery, support, and even the product itself.
A CCO should help ensure all of these functions work seamlessly together.
According to Bliss, the CCO is ultimately responsible for "Uniting the c-suite to elevate the organization to become an admired company and earn the right to customer-driven growth."
This means more than just collecting and presenting survey results or fixing problems. The CCO should give senior leaders enough information to grow the business.
Does a CCO need to have functional responsibility?
Both Bliss and Weader agree that a CCO doesn't necessarily need departments reporting to them such as customer service, marketing, or sales.
"I have yet to find one single mold for a CCO that establishes one typical set of functional responsibilities outside of CX," said Weader. "However, I’ve come across a number of CCOs who are also responsible for brand, marketing, sales, customer success, and/or the contact center. Some of this relates to their reporting structure; if the CCO reports directly to the CEO (which is the most common alignment), then they’re more likely to have a specific function beyond CX reporting to them in order to be efficient at the executive layer."
Bliss agreed that a CCO should report directly to the CEO in order to have the appropriate level of influence within the organization.
She also pointed to a few criteria shared by most successful CCOs:
Already a senior executive when they're promoted.
Experience building collaborative teams.
Have led an operation.
Bliss explained that top CCOs have "dirt under their fingernails" from running part of the business. This helps them better understand the real challenges of continuously improving customer experience.
Whats the difference between a CCO and a CXO?
Generally speaking, the titles of CCO and CXO can be used interchangeably.
"Importantly, Chief Customer Officers may not always go by this title—Chief Experience Officer (CXO) and Chief Client Officer (also CCO) are seen, as well," said Weader.
Is the CCO role a fad or a real trend?
This appears to be a real trend.
Bliss published Chief Customer Officer in 2006. The second edition, Chief Customer Officer 2.0, was released in 2015. The role of the CCO has only continued to proliferate since then.
Weader cited research from her colleague at Forrester, Angelina Gennis. "From 2014 to 2019, we noted explosive growth in CX leadership roles at the executive level, including the CCO: in 2019, there were over 10,000 current job titles for CX executives (including CCO and CXO), versus fewer than 1,000 only 5 years prior."
How do you know if your company needs a CCO?
Bliss offers an excellent 10-point checklist in Chief Customer Officer 2.0 to help you decide whether your company needs a CCO.
I won't share all of it here—you should really get the book—but here are a few highlights:
Do you need someone to clarify and champion the customer experience vision?
Is there a roadmap for the customer experience work to be done?
Do clear metrics exist for measuring progress?
A "no" to one or more of those questions might indicate the need for a CCO.
Interestingly, Bliss also advocates that CCOs try to work themselves out of a job. As an organization matures its customer-focused culture, the CCO function should become embedded in the daily work of every other executive.
Conclusion
This insight Bliss and Weader shared makes a lot of sense. I've observed CCOs struggle when they haven't been put in a position to succeed:
They weren't a member of the senior leadership team.
Their role was limited to collecting and presenting survey data.
The position was added to chase a trend, not because of a strategic imperative.
On the other hand, I’ve seen Chief Customer Officers make an impact on their organization under three conditions:
A strategic need exists for this person.
There's clarity around what this person does.
The CCO is a senior executive.