Chief Customer Officer 2.0 - Jeanne Bliss

Embracing your customers as assets changes the attitude of leaders and the organization, as the objective is to earn the right to growth, through the generation of improvements in the lives of customers. This is the main idea worked on by author Jeanne Bliss in her book "Chief Customer Officer 2.0".

According to Bliss, when you improve the lives of customers, the highest numbers will be achieved, but the change starts by working with their lives, not numbers, which is a significant transformation in the company.

In addition to emphasizing the improvement in the client's life, the author also focuses on breaking silos. Organizational silos happen when a company is not able to get its sectors to communicate and cooperate towards a single common goal: business success.

The heart of your product or service should be to improve the lives of your customers, so you will grow due to the value you provide.

But in order for this to be effective, leadership must break all the silos of the company, that is, all functions must focus on improving the customer's experience and life, and it is necessary to work together to implement improvements.

If the leadership team is not aligned and working together to ensure its success, it will be impossible for the rest of the company to do so.

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About the book "Chief Customer Officer 2.0"

Launched in 2015, "Chief Customer Officer 2.0" was written by author Jeanne Bliss and provides a proven framework that has transformed the customer experience in business into several global verticals.

Following the model that Bliss uses to train the C-Suite and Chief Customer Officers, the book offers the five competency model:

1. Honor and manage customers as assets;
2. Align around the experience;
3. Create a listening path for the client;
4. Proactive experience, reliability and innovation;
5. Leadership, responsibility and culture of a company.

About the author Jeanne Bliss

Jeanne Bliss was a pioneer in the Customer Leadership Executive position, having held the position for twenty years at Lands' End, Allstate, Coldwell Banker, Mazda and Microsoft Corporation.

Since 2002, she has led CustomerBliss, a prominent customer experience transformation company, where she helps companies achieve customer-driven growth.

Jeanne is a co-founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association, created to promote the worldwide discipline of customer experience and customer experience professionals.

She is also the author of the bestsellers: "Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action" and "I Love You More than My Dog".

To whom is this book indicated?

If you believe that companies in today's increasingly commoditized world need to be customer oriented and focused on experience, then the book "Chief Customer Officer 2.0" was made for you!

Through it, you will create a position dedicated to developing a growth mechanism around the individual, living and breathing your company's customers.

Main ideas of the book "Chief Customer Officer 2.0"

• Embracing your customers as assets changes the attitude of leaders and the organization;
• The heart of your product or service must be to improve the lives of your customers;
• All functions need to focus on improving the customer's experience and life, and all functions need to work together to implement improvements;
• There must be a clear and concise way to improve customer experiences and bring the leadership team together.

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Overview: Honor and manage customers as assets

According to the book "Chief Customer Officer 2.0", this is the decisive competence, which makes this work legitimate, which is why you are in the business: increasing the client's assets.

With this competence, the goal is to change to a simple understanding and measurement of success when a company achieves customer-driven growth.

Customer asset metrics track what customers actually did versus translating (and debating) what they say they can do through the search results. No regression analysis per research question or debate results is necessary.

As the leader learns and adopts these simple metrics that measure success, his demand for improvement rivals the demand for meeting sales and revenue targets.

Leaders must begin to personally consider that customers are leaving their businesses, that is, they need to be concerned with "math" between customers entering and leaving - because this delta drives growth.

In addition, the author Jeanne Bliss explains that it is necessary to make the connection between improving the customer experience and the movement of these metrics.

By making a metric that defines the performance of the customer experience, the growth or loss of the customer base can be easily explained to the board.

These customer asset metrics are built across the organization and establish a simple call to leaders. They are tracked by customers, and the conversations are something like this: instead of talking about customer retention, let's start each meeting by discussing our gross numbers of:

• Number of new customers won in this period, in terms of volume and value (strength of their acquisition mechanism); classified by segment;
• Number of customers lost or expired in that period, in volume and value (power of experience and perceived value); how many increased your purchases and how many decreased your level of engagement with you? Sorted by segment;
• Behavioral patterns that show an increase or weakening of the relationship with the client;
• Movement of customers within value segments;
• References from existing customers.

It is important to present customer asset metrics to an entire number of customers, not retention rates, so that there is a clear connection between people and mathematics. For example, we won 22, 000 customers, but lost 27, 000 customers.

Overview: Align around experience

Companies that transform their growth and are deliberate about it, do so because they think of people at the end of their decisions.

A journey structure, even in its simplest form, when used consistently provides rigor to understand where priorities are in customers' lives. By using the journey to comprehensively analyze what the company delivers, it allows the leadership to make choices.

This is the true transformational power in building a journey map for customers (and employees). It is to incorporate a new starting point for the organization's work. Rather than starting with silos, the customer journey provides a framework for getting started with your customers' lives.

According to author Jeanne Bliss, this establishes a structure for leaders to use to guide the direction of business, allowing them to hold people accountable for improving the lives of customers and uniting independent silo scorecards.

Leaders who use the journey map to diagnose the experience and its impact on the growth or reduction of customer assets are more successful because they connect the dots between the two in the narrative to the organization.

Starting with Competency 1 mentioned in the book "Chief Customer Officer 2.0":

"As a result of the experience we delivered to our customers in the last month or quarter or year, here's the growth or loss of our customer assets."

And then on to Competency 2:

"Now, we will go through the stages of the journey to find out where we help or hinder the growth of customers' assets."

Overview: Create a customer listening path

Listening to customers and worrying about their experiences is achieved by incorporating a competence within the organization to tell the story of the customers' lives. The narrative along the consumer's journey is made possible by building a listening path for the customer.

According to author Jeanne Bliss, this listening path will unite leaders and the organization in understanding experiences that affect customer growth or loss. With that competence, you create a method for a company to present customer feedback and tell their story.

As you build your listening path, the customer journey provides the path for storytelling. That is why reaching an agreement in simple stages of the journey is so important.

These stages allow you to collect various sources of information, such as feedback provided by customers as they interact with you, survey feedback, social feedback, experimental listening and other customer experience surveys.

This approach helps to reduce pressure on research as the only metric on which the company focuses and discusses, reducing the debate about research results, the search engine and its connection to revenue and profitability.

It allows search results to be part of a balanced understanding of the experiences delivered to your customer.

This company's approach to diagnosing and focusing on priority actions contrasts with what happens today in the most well-intentioned organizations as they review and react to the research results.

See if this sounds familiar: as results are received separately from surveys, data reports and social media, they are delivered to an area of operation or silo and instructed to "work on it".

As explained in the book "Chief Customer Officer 2.0", every silo, geography or channel determines how to use the information. What happens next is:

• Every leader interprets the results and actions specific to their area of expertise;
• The department that has the survey results delivered to them to "work on them" completes some actions in its own area and then reports back to the next meeting.

These well-intentioned efforts make it appear that problems are being addressed, but instead of completely improving experiences, many independent projects move away from one dimension of experience.

As you know, the customer's broken and unreliable experiences often result from many things throughout the operation that don't work exactly the right way.

For example, billing is a challenging customer experience, not just for what the billing department does. Communication, sales, marketing, operations, IT and billing play a role in what the customer experiences.

Customers experience a company throughout the operation, not in silos. Distributing problems by silo to interpret research results and take action must change to achieve the customer-driven growth and accountability experience.

Overview: Proactive experience, reliability and innovation

Competency 4 creates its "Early Warning System against Erosion of Revenue". It allows your company to know - before customers tell you - whether your operation is reliable or not in terms of the performance of the customer's main points of intersection.

By establishing a competency to manage the process performance of the main points of contact that create or break your relationship with customers, you can start taking action before the relationship between customers is eroded, causing them to fall apart.

Author Jeanne Bliss clarifies in her book "Chief Customer Officer 2.0" that leaders need to be concerned and demand reliable operational performance at key customer intersection points as they affect customers' value-added assessments.

They determine the decision to stay, go out, buy more and recommend it to others. To obtain the right to grow customer assets, they require consistency in the way they are executed in channels, silos and businesses.

Competency 4 provides leaders with real operational performance metrics that proactively measure the reliability of processes that affect priority touch points before survey results arrive.

Using their journey structure and mapping feedback unaided and aided throughout the journey, these multiple sources combine to allow for balanced decision making and information.

For example, in the automotive sector, the test drive experience is essential to the decision to purchase cars. But what most automakers measure is the end result - the number of units sold.

They do not put rigor in building a reliable test drive process, no matter where or when requested. Many are not measuring actual operating performance at the dealership, offering reliability from the test-drive experience, or at the corporate level, by supporting it.

However, a test drive customer's ability or disability is directly related to sales. The only measure available is to ask the customer later in a survey: "How was the test drive?"

Many manufacturers do not proactively track or manage the operational reliability of the following processes that affect the customer's test drive experience:

• Time to respond to customer requests for a test drive;
• Conveniently located dealers and the desired availability of the test-drive vehicle;
• Time between the customer's request for a test drive and the drive itself.

Overview: Leadership, responsibility and culture of a company

For this work to be transformative and persistent, it must be more than a client's manifesto. The commitment to customer-oriented growth is demonstrated by actions and choices. To imitate culture, people need examples.

Competency 5 of the book "Chief Customer Officer 2.0" is the glue that keeps the growth mechanism driven by the customer. It puts in place the leadership behaviors required by a united leadership team to enable the growth of the client's assets.

As you saw in Competencies 1 to 4, there are operational actions and behavioral leadership changes necessary for success.

Here, we focus on the behavioral leadership changes needed in communication, decision making and behaviors necessary (over time) to incorporate them as part of your business engine.

These are actions that change management behavior for escalation leaders, from siled-driven agendas to a company's journey and customer asset growth priorities.

Only then will these competencies be adopted as part of your business mechanism, moving from a program to your operational and cultural DNA.

For author Jeanne Bliss, the culture of the customer is commented on by many leaders, but misunderstood by most organizations. A manifesto or commitment is initiated, but people often don't know how to translate those words into their own performance and priorities.

You must go beyond the client's manifesto and translate the commitment to actions that people will be proud to follow and imitate.

Culture is action, not words. It is the consistent behaviors that guide people on what to model, the decisions made and the actions taken that show that the client's commitment is real and not by word of mouth.

The role of the customer leadership executive is to work with leaders to provide proof that they are committed to improving the lives of customers.

What do other authors say about it?

The author of "Digital Business", Alan Pakes, says that sales are the pillars that support any business. Therefore, you must also focus on winning over your customer and show that you have the right solution for them, guiding them towards selling your product.

In the book by Brazilian businessman Flávio Augusto, "Value Generation", he shows how, instead of just working for capital, it is also important to generate value for customers. By generating value in other people's lives, they will generate value for you.

Finally, the book "Smart Collaboration", by Heidi K. Gardner, highlights the importance of cultivating intelligent collaboration with your employees. Thus, there is a team formed by great professionals aligned in order to expand their horizons, innovate, work as a team and win customer loyalty.

Okay, but how can I apply this to my life?

• Skills and staff count needed to formalize the construction of the five competency structure, so that it can be completed and repeated every month, quarter or with annual planning;
• The decision will need to be made in the first year in relation to the facilitators of the customer experience, guiding the teams to improve the customer experience in solving emerging problems;
• New experience improvement teams will be brought together as leaders identify issues and opportunities to be addressed by the recurring customer room process, causing a constant need for these resources;
• Over time, your resource needs will increase, as more experiment projects in progress will be started with the cadence of the client room;
• The key to adding employees and what makes them successful is keeping leaders personally active and as beneficiaries of what the five competencies offer;
• By repeating the customer room cycle to boost a company's accountability and decision making, leaders will have greater clarity and value for the role and the team.

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