Top Traits Every Chief Customer Officer Needs

The Gist

Persona diversity. Effective CX strategies require a blend of diverse personas, each contributing unique strengths and perspectives to customer engagement and business objectives.
Strategic alignment. Aligning customer outcomes with business objectives through persona-driven strategies enhances upselling, cross-selling, and customer retention.
Holistic approach. Integrating various CCO personas fosters a comprehensive approach to improving products, services, and overall customer experience.

Bias vs. Perspectives

Every chief customer officer comes into their role with the natural biases and filters that affect our world views and how we approach our work life. When we settle into our office each morning, we lean on what we're good at and imagine that our frustrations are commonplace. We are pretty sure that you operate in the same way.

If you, as a CCO or CX leader, have worked in sales for the last decade and you have a general idea that a weak support capability has obstructed your deals, guess what you will be focusing on. You'll want to use your CCO title and remit to make sales more successful, lining up resources to close deals and fixing product support.

If you're a CCO who worked as a management consultant for the last decade and struggled with clients' product development capabilities, you'll likely emphasize change management and will naturally lean into working with your product team so they're more attuned to customer perceptions. Through this, you will exercise CX leadership in shaping the company's approach to customer engagement.

While biases like these are by definition prejudicial (and therefore problematic), as perspectives — in the proper context — they should be prized.

Perspectives vs. Objectives

Every CCO we know has a mix of priorities they focus on — both tactical and strategic. Generally, though, the job of the CCO is fundamentally about impacting four strategic objectives through development of a holistic CX strategy. Those four objectives are:

Improvement of products, services and experience: by resolving issues, addressing root causes and simplifying processes.
Enablement of upselling and cross selling: by alignment of customer outcomes with your business objectives and processes.
Retention of existing customers: by building relationships and loyalty and driving product adoption and realization of customer value.
Acquisition of new customers: by utilization of customers as your most potent sales weapon.

Objectives vs. Competencies & Personas

If you then consider the experience of the CCO (or any other top CX leader) and the lens through which we view the business, it's not much of a leap to identify a set of capabilities needed and to discern how those capabilities translate into personas:

The Fixer is the CCO who likely comes from an engineering, process improvement or operations background. To them, everything is a problem to fix. Their credo might be "fix what's broken and simplify everything." You need a fixer-in-chief to constantly see the worst in your business so that it can be fixed.
The Partner is the CCO who might have spent their career as a management consultant, measuring and quantifying just about everything. Their favorite word is "alignment." You need the partner to be downright maniacal about developing collaborative relationships with customers so that both buyer and seller succeed in attaining their own objectives. That's alignment.
The Therapist is the CCO who has probably been a CCO or CX leader for a while, seeing — and magnifying — the impact of engaging customers and nurturing them along their journey. Their favorite word is likely "journey." The therapist has feelings and isn't afraid to show them. You need the therapist to retain customers through thick and thin, through good times and bad.
The Closer is the CCO who stepped into the role after a long and successful sales career. They will naturally lean in on going after new customers, new logos and creating the world's greatest advocates. The closer is and will always be the consummate salesperson. Of course, their favorite word is "deal." You need the closer for ongoing customer acquisition.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of these approaches. It may sound like we're being a little mocking here, and that's a little bit true (with great affection), but organizations need each of these core traits to clarify strategic objectives, push forward with the right strategies and tactics, and model the right behaviors for the rest of the organization.

To be clearer, each persona is an invaluable member of the team and can have a real impact on the business. You need every single one of these CCOs.

To be clearest, the ideal chief customer officer is someone who, at their core, is one of these personas and can also bring to bear any combination of the other personas to effectively deliver the strategy.

Naturally, life doesn't map neatly to this sort of template. CX leaders come with myriad backgrounds and exhibit traits of multiple personas. One such example is Brian O'Neill. Brian is the chief client officer at Numerated Growth Technologies and is an Experience Alliance member. Brian is a perfect example of the blending of fixer and partner. His approach is straightforward. Brian tells us that "communicating simply and consistently is key to driving successful experience and mutually beneficial outcomes." His mantra at Numerated is "EX+CX=RX," where the EX is employee experience (access to data, systems, and client intelligence) coupled with laser focus on the CX, which is of course client experience (client effort scores, client advisory boards, effective and consistent communication). RX is revenue expansion through retention and new revenue opportunities.

Brian describes this philosophy as "the backbone for CX-related goal-setting and targeting of key results (OKRs), constantly reinforced to secure buy-in throughout the organization. It is intended to reconcile personas and demonstrate a blended approach to drive success."

Related Article: Lighting the Way: Rethinking CX Leadership

CX Leadership: One CCO's Journey

It's a rarity to find one human being who can exhibit every one of these personas in perfect balance. We're not sure we know anyone who can truly do it all equally well. But we do know leaders who can switch gears as needed and create a blended, phased approach to the job.

More importantly, we know leaders who can pull together a team and realize all of these characteristics through the combined effect of multiple leaders working together. After all, isn't the most basic of leadership skills to realize your shortcomings and tap into the expertise of others? That's, of course, easier said than done.

Can the closer work alone and be successful? Certainly, as a sales executive. Closers are an essential resource. But a complete CX leadership strategy requires all four personas in action: the closer, the therapist, the partner and the fixer. Every CCO, at least to a degree, must embody multiple personas, each catering to different aspects of customer experience and business objectives. Every CCO must also recognize their strengths and weaknesses and draw on others to bring all these personas to the tasks at hand.

To understand the full scope of a CCO's capabilities and when those capabilities need to be seized upon, it’s important to explore each persona in some detail. To do this, we will describe Jeb's experience as a CX leader and CCO and how Jeb's approach to the job evolved over 16 years.

In Jeb's earliest adult working life, he was a purchasing agent and supply chain manager. He then went into management consulting for several years, after which he joined Oracle, in its consulting organization for several more years. In total, he spent 10 years as a consultant and was then asked to head up the CX team at Oracle. Four years later, Jeb was promoted to chief customer officer and retired from that role 12 years after that.

You would probably guess that Jeb went into CX feeling like a consultant to the core. That's true. Successful consultants generally do two things for their clients: They fix what's broken, and they help their clients explore new business opportunities by aligning business processes and outcomes. That's what we call a fixer.

The Fixer

In the earliest days as a CX leader, I stepped into a team of regional employees who were to come together as a single corporate team. That new corporate team's job would be to provide customer feedback and customer references to the whole company — across regions and functional organizations. Having been a consultant for many years, the fixer mindset came naturally to me. I suppose that's why I was asked to do the job. As the consolidation, or globalization, of the references and customer feedback functions progressed, I found that we could succeed through a:

Focus: on identifying, socializing and addressing key issues that impact customers and our own organization alike.
Using: data, customer feedback and principles of change management.
Leaning on: our team's functional expertise, a process orientation and intimate customer knowledge.
Demonstrating: the ability to be a great service provider to, and partner with, field teams and other corporate organizations.
Resulting in: a holistic, digestible view of customer feedback, the analytics to make it actionable, and the scale to support sales and marketing transactionally.
For: measurable improvements in products, services and the overall customer experience.

The Partner

Once our fledgling CX team began to gel and we had built some credibility as a corporate team that partnered with — instead of dictated to — the money-making regional organizations and product making development organization, we felt we earned the right to extend our reach into customer engagement and success to:

Focus: on aligning customer outcomes with our own business objectives and processes.
Using: a unique knowledge of customer needs plus expertise in customer value and outcomes.
Leaning on: a strong understanding of the company's strategy, products and sales processes.
Demonstrating: the value of standardization, globalization and specific customer retention programs.
Resulting in: engagement and customer success processes and measures.
For: systematic improvements in upselling and cross-selling.

The Therapist

The next step in building stronger customer (and employee) engagement and customer success capabilities was to expand the focus on customer outcomes to something more quantitative: customer value realization. That required two things: a disciplined approach to drive product adoption and a foundation of strong relationships. What's the best bet for strengthening relationships? A therapist. This new phase of our CX strategy enabled us to:

Focus: on building a key accounts program, executive sponsorship, customer advisory boards, customer communities and other engagement programs that support customers and improve employee teamwork.
Using: customer relationships we had built and a community of committed employees for consensus building and cross-discipline capabilities development.
Leaning on: clear, data-driven customer segmentation, as well as leading customer success and engagement skills.
Demonstrating: that strong relationships with customers can trump more tactical challenges and a customer success orientation is the best tool to align objectives.
Resulting in: stronger loyalty, more sustained (and faster) product adoption, and measurable realization of customer value.
For: improved customer retention.

The Closer

Last, my journey as a chief customer officer closed with a new-found understanding of the power of brand advocacy. It turns out that your happiest, most successful customers are the greatest sales reps you can deploy. And they'll do it for free. The building blocks of feedback & analytics, customer-centered transformational change, customer success and engagement programs all lead to the best possible customer retention and acquisition strategy, provided that you:

Focus: on systematically turning your most prized customers into your strongest brand advocates.
Using: personal customer relationships and a proactive customer care program.
Leaning on: new levels of trust and loyalty.
Demonstrating: that all CX investments ultimately must yield measurable engagement, success and brand advocacy.
Resulting in: the utilization of customers as your most potent sales weapon.
For: sustained acquisition (and retention) of new customers.

A Caveat and a Wrap

If your TV-watching habits are anything like ours, a significant proportion of shows you consume are "based on a true story." That almost always means the storyline has been finessed — sometimes a bit, sometimes a lot — so the narrative more neatly fits the message. This article, especially our musings about how my role as chief customer officer progressed to meet every need, is "based on a true story." Some of the historical facts have been, shall we say, enhanced for the narrative.

Whatever success I had as a CCO was definitely not the result of my unique ability to bring a combination of my own skills to bear in the exact right moment of need, all in service of a 16-year strategic roadmap. I possess no such ability. I am in no way equally skilled as a fixer, partner, therapist and closer. I can do a little bit of all of the above — and only if I have a team working with me to fill the gaps.

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That said, when I look back at my CX career and my role as CCO, do I wish I had a framework or mental model for exactly which capabilities we needed in each circumstance we encountered? Absolutely! That would have saved a lot of pain and heartache — and would have yielded more value, faster to the business.

Ruth Veloria, chief strategy & customer officer at the University of Phoenix and Experience Alliance member, has a great perspective on CX leadership strategy and personas — and how to create value for the business. She told us that "an advantage of coming from a 'partner' or strategy background is that you understand how customer experience contributes to the value proposition of the company's broader strategy. A CX strategy cannot stand alone. Rave reviews are great, but economic value is what assures the sustainability of that strategy. For a retention-based business, elimination of friction to sustain revenues is most important, but for large one-time purchases, designing the best features into the product upfront may be the most important.

"At the end of the day, only valuable products that do the job the customer wants them to do are the products that generate a true following and a large base of recommenders. Delivering those in a feasible way for the bottom line is indispensable. In truth, all personas also have to fix things, bring empathy directly from the customer, and then bring the products and services to market — just as a closer would. We just arrive at that from various personas and perspectives."

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