Earlier this year, Forrester released its report, The US Customer Experience Index, 2019. Forrester Chief Research Officer Carrie Johnson said, of these findings, “How an experience makes customers feel has a bigger influence on their brand loyalty than any other factor.”
And yet, this report found that while 14% of brand scores rose, 5% of scores declined and an incredible 81% stagnated. As increased emphasis falls on customer experience to impact loyalty, customer experience executives (CCOs, CXOs) must take a leadership role in driving company culture through actions that improve CX—in order to achieve customer-driven growth.
Now, more than ever, the 5 competencies that I introduced in my best-selling book, Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine must be revisited as the foundation of our work.
As a Chief Customer Officer (or Customer Experience Executive), you must work with the board, the C-Suite, and across the organization to embed behaviors and actions that unite silo-based organizations in focusing on priorities in customers’ lives. This manner of doing business honors employees and customers, resulting in a sustainable, repeatable and deliberate one-company approach to growth.
Here’s a checklist of 28 actions that you can refer to within the 5 competencies, to help you bring your teams together and lead them to success.
HONOR AND MANAGE CUSTOMERS AS ASSETS OF THE BUSINESS
- Enable and inspire decision-making driven by honoring customers as assets.
- Elevate customer growth/loss as a success metric of the business.
- Build one-company definitions of customer segments, customers to invest in.
- Establish behavioral indicators of growth or loss of relationship.
- Unite leadership in customer-asset growth definition and communication.
ALIGN AROUND EXPERIENCE: UNITE THE ORGANIZATION TO DELIVER VALUED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES
- Lead one-company prioritization of investment on high-impact experiences.
- Establish one-company journey maps and identification of priority experiences.
- Create a common language set and definitions for the customer experience.
- Unite the organization of the evaluation of experience reliability performance.
- Help leaders deliver united communication and focus on experiences.
BUILD A CUSTOMER LISTENING PATH: ESTABLISH ACTIVE CUSTOMER LISTENING AND UNDERSTANDING
- Be the storyteller of customers’ lives.
- Define what customers value and understand evolving needs.
- United aided and unaided feedback, such as surveys to tell a one-company customer story.
- Align multiple sources of customer feedback to the customer journey.
- Create a united platform for understanding customers’ lives & focused action.
BE PROACTIVE ABOUT EXPERIENCE RELIABILITY AND INNOVATION
- Embed skills to understand and improve priority experiences.
- Build a customer experience development process to enable cross-company teams to improve unreliable and innovation opportunity experiences.
- Teach teams to build reliability metrics for priority experiences.Elevate priority process metrics in critical experiences to earn C-suite focus.
- Manage priority experience processes proactively to earn customer growth.
- Identify and focus on customer behavior movement as a result of priority experiences to establish connection and ROI to customer-driven growth.
ONE-COMPANY LEADERSHIP, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND DECISIONS
- Unite leaders in focusing the organization on improving customers’ lives.
- Engage leaders personally in the build-out of the competencies.
- Unite leadership communication and messaging.
- Enable employees to deliver value. Get rid of stupid rules and barriers.
- Establish experiential learning for walking in the customers’ shoes.
- Drive rigorous communication and engagement.
- Unite leaders in building a lens for decision-making that begins with growing customers as assets.
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Jeanne Bliss is the Founder of CustomerBliss, She is the author of the groundbreaking book, “Chief Customer Officer” and bestseller “Would You Do That to Your Mother” She is a highly sought after speaker, keynoting high profile conferences and events. Visit her website at www.customerbliss.com