Six Things to Look for in a Chief Customer Officer.

Excerpted from Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action

#1: Passion and Persistence. When you are considering a candidate for the CCO position, first listen for passion. Then probe for persistence. Ask CCO candidates how they do with resistance. Do they thrive on it or just survive? These should be the times that really get a potential CCO’s adrenaline flowing. Fundamental to a CCO’s passion and persistence is the ability to stay motivated for the long haul of the work. The CCO needs to be close enough to the end game to stay motivated even when it’s off into the future. CCOs must harness that passion regularly to sell the virtues of the work and the journey to believers and non-believers. They’ve got to believe in it enough to stake their reputation on making it happen. This is not one of those jobs you can rotate people into. There’s no faking passion. You either thrive in driving change or you don’t. Make sure you hire someone with these attributes and make sure you’ve got them yourself if it’s your job to drive the action.

#2: Ability to Give the Power Away. Astute CCOs understand that this unique power they possess cannot be abused; in fact, it must be given away. With a strong CEO and CCO partnership, people are going to want to jump on this bandwagon, and one of the greatest tools a CCO has to continue motivating participation is having people present their own actions, and putting them front and center to take the credit. The greatest measure of success for the CCO is when the work is adopted by people as their own, when the prodding starts to taper off, and when it becomes a part of the DNA of the organization. That will never happen if the CCO is a credit hog.

#3: Revenue = Attention. Let’s not delude ourselves. The work’s about building the business through the growth of customer profitability and company revenue. The CCO has got to be able to make and prove this case to gain executive and board support. Know that this is job number one. CCOs should first spend the time to understand the different accounting methods throughout the company to learn how and if customers are valued, tracked, and accounted for. This will likely be disjointed and will take real effort to tease out the information from throughout the organization. Establish a partnership with finance to cobble together the customer accounting approaches and establish a system for tracking customers and the cost to serve them. The company has to move past the classic quarterly sales goals or production goals or operational objectives as the only metric to define how the business is doing.

“This is why I created ‘Guerrilla Metrics,'” writes Bliss. “These cut through the clutter and force accountability on the state of the company’s relationship with customers. These are likely metrics that someone might be collecting somewhere, but they’re not front and center like quarterly sales goals. They’re certainly not debated and challenged in the same way, but they should be–for example: Do you know the volume and value of your incoming customers? Do you know the top five reasons that your customers left this quarter? Do you know how many complaints are occurring by category? CCOs have to use their passion and persistence to get people to believe these are important. And they’ve got to convince senior leaders to commit the time necessary to making these a part of how they ask questions and define the business.”

#4: Action–Not Crystal Balls and Coffee Mugs. The company will need to see substantive change to believe that the commitment is true and real and understand what it means in terms of things they should do. The CCO’s job is to keep it real. There have likely been efforts that have come before this most recent proclamation to the customer. The corporate memory keepers have little patience for empty commitments to the customer. The CCO has got to get real change going. People will respond a lot better and will be pleased and relieved that they finally have some actions to take their cue from in terms of what they should do.

#5: Survival of the Chameleon. The CCO can’t be seen as an outsider, even if brought in from the outside. A new CCO should understand the functions of the organization to move as quickly as possible from being labeled an outsider to being considered “one of us.” Most importantly, CCOs need to know the players and what their hot buttons are. The CCO will use this knowledge to thrive as a chameleon, modifying approaches as necessary to connect with each part of the organization. Talking with the sales vice president and sales force to understand their priorities requires a different approach from understanding and working with marketing from their perspective. Operations may need another, and human resources yet another. Driving change at times is like throwing pasta against a wall: the message and commitment will stick for one part of the organization but won’t stick for another. Persistence and ingenuity need to kick in frequently for CCOs as they will find it necessary to deliver a multitude of approaches for driving the work.

#6: Marketing Hope. In this CCO job, you’re nothing if you can’t understand what customers and the company need, deliver it to them, and remind them that you gave it to them. Marketing back is the promised land to helping customers believe that the company is listening and acting on their words. It jolts the naysayer out of thinking things can’t or won’t get done. It’s absolutely essential to getting the future momentum you need by feeding the organization hope one morsel at a time. All CCOs need to have a little bravado in them to do this marketing back. They’ve got to be unabashedly proud to toot the horn of the company’s accomplishments. And they’ve got to have the guts and gusto to stomp throughout all levels of the organization to get people out of their ruts and into taking action. Shrinking violets need not apply.

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