Customer Experience Thrives With Executive Leadership April 29, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Chief customer officer, Customer experience, Executive leadership, Experience-Based Differentiation.add a comment
In a recent research report called Customer Experience Thrives With Executive Leadership, I examined data from 287 large US firms in our customer experience panel. Almost half (45%) had an executive in charge of customer experience across products and channels; a role that I refer to as a chief customer/experience officer (CC/EO). Here’s a summary of what I found when comparing responses from the firms with a CC/EO to those without one:
Firms with these leaders view customer experience as more important, have more enterprisewide customer experience efforts, report having fewer obstacles, do more primary customer research, and score better in all three areas of Experience-Based Differentiation.
When it came to the Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD) self-test, here’s how many firms ended up with a rating of either “excellent” or “good” for each of the three principles of EBD:
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Obsess about customer needs, not product features
With CC/EO: 39%
Without CC/EO: 24% -
Reinforce brands with every interaction, not just communications
With CC/EO: 46%
Without CC/EO: 30% -
Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function
With CC/EO: 42%
Without CC/EO: 24%
The bottom line: A CC/EO can help turn customer experience into a competency.
Customer Experience Execs Help Banks November 14, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Chief customer officer, Customer experience, Executive leadership, Experience-Based Differentiation, Financial services.add a comment
A recent post, Lessons Learned From Chief Customer Officers, highlighted some of my findings from discussion with a number of senior customer experience executives. It was clear to me that these execs were making a difference within their organizations.
But what about for banks? They have an uphill customer experience battle — as we can see in this fun video created by IBM:
Earlier this year, Forrester did a joint survey of 190 North American banks with the American Banker which I discussed in the post “Banks Prepare For Customer Experience Wars.” I recently published a Forrester Research report called Customer Experience Execs Help Banks that compared responses from the 54% of banks that have an executive in charge of customer experience (which we’ll call a Chief Customer/Experience Officer, or “CC/EO”) across channels with those that don’t. Here is some of the data from that report:
- The top 3 obstacles to customer experience success:
- With CC/EO: Lack of cooperation across organizations (49%), lack of a clear customer experience strategy (48%), and lack of understanding about customers (36%)
- No CC/EO: Lack of customer experience management processes (70%), lack of a clear customer experience strategy (51%), and lack of budget (40%)
- Use a single set of customer feedback scores across the company:
- With CC/EO: 61%
- No CC/EO: 27%
- Passed our self-test on principle #1 of Experience-Based Differentiation: “Obsess about customer needs, not product features:”
- With CC/EO: 31%
- No CC/EO: 18%
The bottom line: Change takes leadership — bank on it!
Customer Experience: The Invisible War October 26, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Chief customer officer, Customer experience, Customer-centric DNA.add a comment
As I mentioned in my post with words of wisdom from Babe Ruth, many firms have been asking me about building customer-centric DNA. This same focus also comes out loud and clear in my research with senior customer experience execs. I think it’s summed up nicely in this quote by a Chief Customer Officer that I shared in the post Lessons Learned From Chief Customer Officers:
What’s more important, but less tactical and takes longer, is the realization that customer experience is culture. It’s the mindset of our associates and their empowerment. Not stuff, but attitudinal. We’ve recognized that this is a journey.
The fact that customer experience is a journey that needs to focus on culture has a very important implication: you can’t easily benchmark your competitors. While all customer experience initiatives will have some highly visible, short-term results, the most dramatic improvements will come over time - as firms change attitudes and behaviors of employees across the organization.
Firms that spend too much time just trying keeping up with the visible changes made by their competitors may miss these more fundamental, yet less-visible shifts. As a result, they risk getting defeated in the long-term, invisible customer experience wars.
The bottom line: You may already be losing the customer experience wars — and not even realize it yet.
Lessons Learned From Chief Customer Officers October 14, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Chief customer officer, Customer experience, Customer experience measurement, Customer-centric DNA, Executive leadership, Voice of the customer.add a comment
I just published a report called the “The Chief Customer/Experience Officer Playbook.” To research the report, I interviewed executives with responsibility for customer experience that cut across normal product and/or channel boundaries (we call them Chief Customer/Experience Officers or CC/EOs) from several different organizations including Air Transat, Alaska Air Group, Bank of America, Bombardier, the California State Automobile Association, Century Furniture, the Colorado Rockies, and Symantec. In addition, I spoke with Jeanne Bliss, author of the book Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action.
The research identified five categories of things that CC/EOs should do:
- Make sure that you’ve got the right environment.
- Prepare to take on a broad change agenda.
- Establish a strong operating structure.
- Kick off high-priority activities.
- Look ahead to the future.
The report goes into much more detail for each of these items. While I can’t share the whole report in my blog (that’s reserved for Forrester clients), I did want to share some of the most interesting quotes from the CC/EOs:
- “It takes massive support from senior management. This role can destruct careers.”
- “What’s more important, but less tactical and takes longer, is the realization that customer experience is culture. It’s the mindset of our associates and their empowerment. Not stuff, but attitudinal. We’ve recognized that this is a journey.”
- “Each of the groups in our company already had some customer experience efforts, so I wanted to make sure that they were on board and not threatened. I needed to talk to each of those groups individually. It’s an ongoing issue - and it’s an ongoing effort for me.”
- “We focus on employees first. Happy employees make a happy customer. They were very skeptical - so much of our communication is internally driven. We need to support the hell out of them.”
- “I do a read out to the leadership team every month and tell them my perspectives on how we’re doing (fact-based); a no-holds-barred discussion. No attempt to keep any of that stuff under the rug.”
- “Customers want one relationship with us and we’ve given them about 10. Our data sources and systems are isolated; the organizations are isolated. We’re trying to break down the silos.”
- “We’re changing metrics in the call center to eliminate focus on average talk time.”
- “If I did it over again, I would have focused earlier on consolidating our customer listening posts and voice of the customer efforts. We now look at the perception of reliability, not the actual reliability.”
- “We’re looking for line of site between our initiatives and NPS, which is a lagging indicator. We’ve worked on projects that have taken three quarters to improve the NPS.”
The bottom line: CC/EOs shouldn’t “own” customer experience, but they can really help support the organizational transformation required to improve it.
The Colorado Rockies Embraces Its Guests August 9, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Chief customer officer, Customer experience, Executive leadership.3 comments
I was recently talking with Kevin Kahn, Chief Customer Officer and Vice President of Ballpark Operations of the Colorado Rockies. Kevin leads a cross-functional group that focuses on delivering great experiences for sponsors, employees, and guests (I like that they refer to someone who goes to their park as a ”guest” which the Meriam-Webster dictionary defines as ”a person to whom hospitality is extended.”)
His vision was clear: to make Coors Field the safest, cleanest, most family-friendly facility in professional sports.
During our discussion, Kevin told me a story that he felt showcased how empowered and committed the Rockies employees were to delivering a great guest experience:
At one of the Rockies’ home games, a guest lost the keys to his car. An employee took him in his car to the guest’s house to get a spare key and then drove him back to the park — an hour each way!
How do the Colorado Rockies create an environment where this type of experience can happen? Kevin provided a few insights into the answer:
- Executive commitment. According to Kevin, the guest experience has always been the primary focus of the Rockies. Why is that? Because the Rockies’ President makes it clear to the entire organization that it’s critical.
- Employee communications and training. Recognizing that employees influence many moments of truth for its guests, the ballclub focuses on communicating with employees (including daily briefings) and it puts a lot of time and effort into training — which actually includes some role playing.
- Employee recognition. The ballclub looks for ways to provide an enhanced experience for its employees. Besides bonus programs and highlighting special efforts by employees, the Rockies also try to find ways to connect employees to the overall business. Some of their programs: players give autographs at employee entrance gates and the General Manager and scouting team (who focus on the players) meet with the employees to discuss the strategy and goals of the team.
- Cross-functional cooperation. The team recognizes that the guest experience depends on a number of internal organizations like ticketing, retail operations, and baseball operations as well as partners like foodservice provider Aramark, the parking service, and the local police. That’s why Kevin leads a cross-functional group that works collectively to raise the level of service for the guests.
As everyone around me knows, I’m a huge Boston Red Sox fan (Kevin was willing to speak with me anyway). I go to a number of games at Fenway Park throughout the season and have run into many less-than-ideal experiences at the park. Maybe it’s because there’s no Chief Customer Officer on the Red Sox executive team. My advice to the Red Sox and ALL sports teams: Follow the Rockies lead.
The bottom line: Fans have to deal with both wins and losses, but “guests” shouldn’t have to deal with anything less than a great experience.
Chief Customer Officer: To Do, Or Not To Do? June 20, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Chief customer officer, Customer experience, Executive leadership.2 comments
There’s a question that I’ve heard a lot that seems to stir up some debate: Do firms need a Chief Customer Officer? Well, I’ve run into zealots on both sides of the argument.
Those that say “absolutely yes” are convinced that companies can’t change without a senior executive who “owns” customer relationships; someone who can bring senior executive visibility to all of a company’s customer-facing efforts. The argument is compelling — customers are certainly important enough to deserve a dedicated executive.
Those that say “absolutely not” are convinced that companies can’t just fix the problem by creating a new executive position. They believe that this ends up being a superficial move — like putting lipstick on a pig. The argument is compelling — people often call for a new executive whenever they don’t know what else to do.
It’s an interesting dilemna when both sides of an argument are compelling. My position on this question is equally dogmatic: Absolutely yes and absolutely no.
To understand my position, let’s start by shifting the questin a bit. Instead of asking whether or not you need a person with the specific title of “Chief Customer Officer” let’s ask whether or not you need an executive in charge of a concerted effort to improve customer experience across the enterprise. If a company is truly committed on improving their customer experience, then an executive in charge of that change process will be very important. That person (who may or may not be called “Chief Customer Officer”) can lead a host of efforts like the establishing customer experience metrics and developing of a voice of the customer program.
But this type of position only makes sense if the CEO is truly committed to a significant change and will hold the entire executive team (not just the new executive) accountable for results. If the plan is to make the new executive responsible for “owning” the customer experience, then don’t create this position — it will only provide a handy scapegoat for executives that don’t make the required changes in their organizations.
If you’re a Forrester Research client, then you can read more about my point of view in the report “Considering A Chief Customer/Experience Officer?”
Another great resource for anything having to do with a Chief Customer Officer is Jeanne Bliss – she wrote a great book on the topic: The Chief Customer Officer.
