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| By Curtis N. Bingham |
Do organizations have a customer conscience?
Are there voices within corporate structures
today that demand to be heard, insisting that
customers' needs be considered at every turn?
Is it really anyone's job to provide balance to
the traditional cost cutting and revenue-growth
strategies?
We recently studied companies like Sun
Microsystems, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard,
Monster.com, Fidelity, and others that have an
executive-level customer champion and found
that many companies today have indeed
institutionalized this role. One of our
interviewees, Marissa Peterson, the chief
customer advocate and executive vice
president of worldwide operations for Sun
Microsystems, responded to our questions by
labeling herself Sun's customer conscience.
Peterson oversees Sun Sigma and other
programs through which Sun proactively
gathers what it calls voice of the customer
insight and use resulting data to make strategic
decisions throughout the organization.
Though there are a multitude of responsibilities
that a chief customer officer or other
executive-level customer champion could have,
depending upon the organizational goals,
growth plans, structure, and market segments.
All the executives we interviewed shared the
following four critical goals: increase revenue,
bring customer balance to executive
decision-making processes, manage the customer relationship as an asset, and proactively gather customer insight and drive organizationwide change.
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Increase revenue
Across the board, everyone is ultimately
responsible for increasing revenue. Champions
can help shorten sales cycles through customer
management and reference programs.
Companies can grow revenue through an
increased focus on the identification of new
products and services. New opportunities for
securing a larger share of wallet of the
existing customer base are often waiting to
be noticed and exploited.
Bring customer balance to executive
decision-making processes
Executive-level customer champions can
counter the c-suite and the board's traditional
focus on revenue growth and cost
containment, which has often resulted in
damaged customer relationships and
diminished long-term results.
Manage the customer relationship
as an asset
Despite the fact that U.S. accounting
principles do not consider a customer
relationship an asset, perhaps one of the most
important responsibilities is to manage
customer relationships with every bit the
same amount of effort that capital assets
throughout the company are carefully
managed to control costs and maximize
effectiveness. Strategic customer relationships
need to be defined and strengthened, the
customer experience carefully managed, and
customer loyalty carefully cultivated.
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Gather customer insight and drive
organizationwide change
Satisfaction is fleeting and customers' needs
change faster than we would like to admit.
The competition is always seeking to steal
customers. To be successful the customer champion must gather objective knowledge of
the needs of customers, prospects, and the
marketplace, using tools and techniques like
regional user groups, executive roundtables,
champions for key accounts, and a customer hall
of fame.
Insight alone is wholly insufficient; it must be
made actionable and the requisite changes
must to be driven through the entire
organization. Employees should have access to
interpretations by customer champions or
product/service specialists as well as raw data
for subsequent interpretation or
reinterpretation. Employees should be
measured and compensated according to
customer-facing metrics. Perhaps most
important, the measurement, analysis, and
change cycle should be continuous.
Do you have a customer conscience? Does your
organization know for certain what customers
and prospects need, want, and what they are
willing to pay for? With a chief customer officer
as your customer conscience you can bring
balance to the executive-level decision-making
processes as have the companies studied in our
survey. They have found that incorporating a
customer conscience leads to longer and more
profitable relationships with key customers,
which in turn leads to achieving the ultimate
goal of increased and more profitable revenues.
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| About the author : |
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Curtis N. Bingham, President of The Predictive Consulting Group, helps
organizations dramatically increase customer acquisition, retention, &
profitability. For more information about Customer Strategy, his new
Customer Experience Audit, or Chief Customer Officers, visit his website at http://www.predictiveconsulting.com or his blog at http://www.curtisbingham.com |
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