Sure, The Customer Is Important, But Is The CCO?

Customer is key—hence the appearance of chief customer officer on the scene. But what is his role exactly and how long will your brand need him for?

“The moment you change your title to chief customer officer, the business is sending a signal to the rest of the organisation that the customer is important.”

That was the view of UKTV CMO Simon Michaelides, speaking to CMO.com. But does that mean the chief customer officer is now a fixture in the C-suite of enlightened businesses? Or is the work of the CCO done once a customer-centric approach has been embedded in the organisation?

A Broadening Role

Yorkshire Building Society has had a CCO for more than six years, but the nature of the role has changed during that time. The post is currently held by Mike Regnier, who has been in the job for two years.

“Since last November, the role has involved a broader set of responsibilities than might be the case in other companies,” he explained. “I’m responsible for products and marketing—so I’m CMO as well—and also our distribution. I’ve got everything that’s customer-facing and everyone with a customer-facing role.”

Regnier believes the CCO role is vital for two reasons. First, as products and services become increasingly commoditised and easy to copy, companies are having to compete on the quality of the customer experience they offer.

Second, companies also need to find ways to learn how to improve their business from their customers.

Regnier, for example, also has the customer relations team within his remit.

“By having customer relations closely integrated, the insights about what makes customers unhappy are available, and it means the problems can be fixed,” he said.

Marketing In The Lead?

The point about needing to be customer-centric is echoed by Chris Daly, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, but he has a different view of where the responsibility should lie.

“Marketing has never been more important. Businesses want to be more customer-focused, which is a good thing,” he said. “The whole organisation is responsible for the customer experience, but marketing should be leading that.”

Daly’s view is that the chief customer officer role sits firmly in the marketing territory.

“There is a need for organisations to capture customer engagement and translate it into more agile marketing activity, but that should rest with marketers,” he said.

Regnier draws a distinction between the broad role he has at YBS and the narrower definition of the chief customer officer’s remit he sees at other companies. These, he says, tend to be focused on customer experience and the customer journey, and sit naturally next to the traditional CMO. But he also believes this type of role is more likely to be eclipsed as the customer-centric thinking spreads throughout the business.

“They’re like the chief digital officer roles of a few years ago. Digital was new, so companies brought in an expert as a figurehead, but slowly that expertise became part of the business.

“These people are change agents,” Regnier explained. “They have the tenacious drive for improvement that you need in these roles. But that approach should be formalised within the company; you should get everyone thinking that way. So a good CCO will work themselves out of a job.”

Keeping Up With Customers

This view isn’t shared by Chris Duncan, chief customer officer at News U.K, publisher of The Sun and The Times newspapers.

“Theoretically, you can engineer a business so that everyone has a constant voice of the customer in their ear, and the ability to act on it,” he said. “But I don’t think we’ll get to the point where customers stop changing. So the question becomes where do I have to be in a year’s time to keep delivering the experiences customers expect.

“There are also an infinite number of choices around how you experiment with technology. The CCO’s role becomes about making the right bets around where the audience is that we need to serve and the choices we need to make to reach them. It becomes more strategic—which experiences add value rather than detracting from value.”

But Duncan does agree that the CCO’s role is becoming broader, in particular adding responsibilities such as insight and analytics.

“I have responsibility for business intelligence, because the challenge is one of interpretation,” he said. “Businesses increasingly need context, they need to know what the numbers mean.”

Duncan believes that CCO’s role goes beyond the role of the traditional CMO. He holds a similar view to UKTV’s Michaelides—that the job is to bring the customer to the centre of the business.

“It’s hard to do that in the traditional CMO role where the company produces product and gives it to marketing to promote and sell,” he said.

Daly disagrees.

“Walking hand-in-hand with customers should be the natural place for marketers,” he said. “But they should also be bringing the organisation with them, and making sure they’re talking the language of the board, rather than the language of technology.

“I think there’s potential for the CMO to take on the mantle of the CCO. Putting the customer at the centre is the basis of marketing. What job title you choose is up to the organisation.”