Chief Customer Officer

• The role of the Chief Customer Officer is relatively new. Individuals in this role work as a part of a company's leadership team and aim to improve the customer experience and journey. Other titles for this role include Chief Experience Officer, Chief Client Officer and Executive Vice President, Member Experience.
• Because employee experience can have a direct impact on customer experience, some companies such as Adobe, Hasbro include both customer and employee experience is the Chief Experience Officer role. The Chief Human Resources Officer at IBM, Diane Gherson, explains that two-thirds of the company's customer experience scores can be explained by employee engagement.

Key Advantages to Hiring a Chief Customer Officer

• A Chief Customer Office can oversee and optimize the entire customer journey and implement the necessary changes and improvements in individual departments. Having a single role dedicated to customer experience can unify the company and the leadership to optimize customer experience and customer-driven growth.
• A Chief Customer or Chief Experience Officer can improve customer retention rates and revenue per customer, advises SBI.
• The Chief Customer Officer is most successful when they have the support of the company's CEO and board, notes Forbes. Without the support of the other members of the leadership team, the Chief Customer Officer may become a figurehead unable to make meaningful changes in the company.

Key Performance Indicators for a Chief Customer Officer

• The role of the Chief Customer Officer is still poorly defined and most individuals only remain in the position for an average of 26 months, according to the Chief Customer Officer Council.
• Annette Franz, a Certified Customer Experience Professional, notes that the teams she works with do not yet have established key performance indicators. Rather, their results are measured on more general metrics such as customer satisfaction, customer effort score, first call resolution and lifetime customer value.
• Franz notes that one main challenge of measure the success and effectiveness of the role is the difficulty in measuring and determining the impact of customer emotion which directly impact the customer experience and brand loyalty.
• Kurt Schroeder, the Chief Experience Officer for Avtex Solutions, notes that customer experience spans the entire customer journey and this impacts many departments including sales, marketing and customer service. While business owners may recognize the importance of customer experience, he describes it as a "squishy" concept.