CEOs: Your CX Leader is Your Most Valuable Player
In sports, a Most Valuable Player (MVP) is your team member who propels and protects your team's value to the greatest extent.
In business, the MVP is mistakenly assumed to be your CFO or CRO -- who's bringing in the money and ensuring your business is stable and thriving.
Mistakenly? Yes.
Anything that bothers customers and employees costs you tremendously! Everything aligned to customers and employees brings in more money and ensures your business is stable and thriving.
Aligning your enterprise to customers and employees is the domain of your Chief Customer Officer, as the collector of customer insights. This is why your CCO is your MVP. Otherwise, you're putting the cart before the horse. (horse = customers who pay for dividends, budgets, salaries)
Customer experience excellence is not walking behind the horse in the parade. That's value rescuing. Customer Service and Customer Success rescue value that could have existed in the first place if corners weren't cut. Sloppy management necessitates CS. Value creating is right-the-first-time mindset which avoids mis-alignment with customers, and extensive costs caused by that misalignment.
Imagine how value-creating in place of value-rescuing might avoid inflation, skimpflation, shrinkflation, austerity, and reductions in force. Consider what's left on the table for risk reduction, differentiation, and sustained advantages.
CX Strategy = Business Strategy
Business excellence and customer experience excellence are one and the same: meet or exceed expectations of the hand that feeds you.
Your answers to these 4 questions may be different names. Maybe no names. Yet, this is the key to it all. And someone needs to coordinate it. Expectations are a moving target, shaped by the economy, competitors, and even other industries. You know that about investors and you strive to keep it on target. That's the tail wagging the dog. Elevate your CCO to mind these 4 questions!
Position your CCO as an ally to every C-Suite member's success in maximizing profitability. Free-up your CCO to concentrate on the 4 questions above, with their deputies running Customer Service, Customer Success, Digitalization, etc.
Incongruent CCO Reality
In a recent poll about the top priority of a VP-CX / CCO, there is overwhelming agreement for influencing customer-centered management of your business. Yet, CCO job descriptions, charters, conferences, books, etc, are at-odds with this!
My recent article summarizes how the Wall Street Journal reported new CCOs' vision of customer-centered management, in contrast to their actual job role with zero reference to influencing the 4 questions above.
“They want their focus on keeping customers happy to seep into all levels and departments of the company, essentially putting themselves out of a job,” reported the Wall Street Journal on June 23, 2021: Some Chief Customer Experience Officers Want to Make Their Jobs Disappear. However, every CCO interviewed was 100% focused on customer touchpoint management -- NOT customer-centered management companywide. There is no mention in their job announcement press releases that they will champion the 4 questions above. Perusal of 2023 CCO / VP-CX job descriptions are the same: they're actually CS.
All C-Suite members START with (A) a holistic proactive plan (value-creating) plus bandwidth for (B) opportunities as they arise and (C) corrections as they arise (value-rescuing). However, most Chief Customer Officers to-date start with C and B, without A. In the diagram below, C is Touchpoint Management, B is Experience Management, and A is Experience Leadership.
Why is your CX Leader (CCO/CXO/VP-CX) your MVP?
Recommended by LinkedIn
I welcome your questions and comments about these recommendations.
Author Lynn Hunsaker coined the phrase "Experience Leadership" to represent what's needed in the 2020s to pivot to far greater trust, respect, values, and value. To fast-track your pivot, Experience Leadership Mastery guides you within 2 to 10 hours across every managerial level in customer, partner, and employee experience combined.
You're Invited!
As ClearAction's CX Day gift to you, our complimentary webinar on October 19 will help you make 2024 your most efficient, customer-centric, and growth-generating year ever. See more at Growth via Massive Customer Experience Savings. This is a 30-minute encore presentation from Lynn Hunsaker's 90-minute session at CXPA's 2023 CX Leaders Advance conference.
Super-Charge Your Most Valuable Players
1. How to Quantify CX for Buy-In and ROI
How to apply costs and/or revenue to ANYTHING you are doing.
2. Experience Leadership Mastery Sessions
Experience Leadership is for beginners and experts.
‘Leadership’ influences all. ‘Management’ controls some.
You learn how to influence internal engagement to prevent issues for customers, employees, and partners. Issue-free experience is automatic experience excellence. This drives indisputable ROI, maturity, differentiation, and career enjoyment. It can prevent austerity, layoffs, inflation, skimpflation, shrinkflation. Experts XM Leadership (CRCs) + XM Fundamentals + CCXP (live public session or privately scheduled or standalone self-paced)
3. CX Leaders' Influence Playbooks
Join CX Leaders Masterminds for any 4-week series
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I just left a position where I was not appreciated. What did I do? I was the face of this small business. I dressed for success. I greeted the potential customer when they walked through the door. I explained the business, interviewed them, and decided whether to schedule them for an appointment with the principal. I knew their concerns, and when they decided to sign with us, I created a storyline including a testimonial for our marketing. And, I was replaced. I was Accounts Payable as well. And, when my twin Accounts Receiveable retired, he replaced us both. The boss never considered what I did outside of Accounts Payable. Strange. But, true. He lost the CCO and marketer, thinking he was getting a deal with a new controller who could do it all. Thank you for this article!
Chief Marketing Officer | Leading startup and scaleup companies' growth through GTM excellence and partner ecosystems | Writing guidebook on business acumen for marketers | B-Corp evangelist.
1yGreat article, Lynn. I love the four questions. Pondering how many CCOs speak the language of Finance and can demonstrate the causal effect of CX programs on the P&L. That would be a game changer.