Today’s interview is with Jeanne Bliss, who is the Founder and President of CustomerBliss, and the Co-Founder of The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA). Jeanne joins me today to talk about her new book: Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The pre-life, early life and in-life stages of the employee experience – Interview with Jo Taylor – and is number 150 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Highlights of my interview with Jeanne:

• Jeanne pioneered the role of the Chief Customer Officer, holding the first ever CCO role at Lands’ End, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker and Allstate Corporations.
• Jeanne’s new book: Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine is an updated version of her original book: Chief Customer Officer, published ten years ago, and is a methodology and toolkit for C-suite executives to undertake customer driven business transformation.
• A Chief Customer Officer (CCO) is someone who works across the organisation to unite the operations of the business and the decisions of leaders to start with the perspective of improving customers lives. That’s often not very natural for some organisations and leaders.
• A CCO can operate both as a senior change agent, reporting to the CEO, or as an add-on role for someone like a Chief Marketing Officer or Head of Sales.
• However, the content of the book is about both the role and the competencies that the organisation needs to develop.
• Jeanne talks about 5 competencies as, to date, much of the work around customer experience has been reactionary and that firms and individuals need to build up their competencies if they are to succeed and deliver the experiences that their customers want.
  • Competency 1 is Honour and Manage Customers as Assets – this is about knowing what customers actually did to impact business growth versus what they may have said via a series of surveys. This helps leaders in the business get close to what is changing with customer behaviour and why.
  • Competency 2 is Align Around The Customer Experience – this means changing leaders language so that it is focused on the customer and moves away from siloed thinking and language. This means that it will become more focused on the customer journey and driving accountability to the stages of the customer journey and not to silos.
  • Competency 3 is Build a Customer Listening Path – this is all about building a whole and one-company listening system that follows trends and maps feedback, complaints etc to the different stages of the customer journey so that it focuses the organisation on key areas for improvement to drive customer growth.
  • Competency 4 is Proactive Experience Reliability & Innovation – this all about developing the knowledge and insight, around the intersection points that impact customer decisions, and how the business is doing and what needs to be improved even before you receive survey scores.
  • Competency 5 is One-Company Leadership, Accountability, Decision Making & Culture – this is all about creating ‘customer rooms’ that step leaders through the story of customers lives on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis so that they can improve decisions and operational actions that lead to customer driven growth.
• These are not just competencies that exist in one role but is more about changing the behaviours of the organisation.
• In the writing of the book, Jeanne interviewed around 40 CCOs around the world.
• Jeanne cites examples like ESRI and Smithsonian Institute that have used and benefited from the development of and implementation of these competencies.
• The last chapter of the book discusses and offers a series of questions around the role of the CCO, what it is and whether a company is set up to and willing to d the work that Jeanne is advocating. A CCO is not for everyone.
• Check out Jeanne’s book: Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine and her website: CustomerBliss.

About Jeanne (taken and adapted from her website bio)

Jeanne Bliss is the Founder and President of CustomerBliss, and the Co-Founder of The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA).

She is one of the foremost experts on customer-centric leadership and the role of the Chief Customer Officer and pioneered the role of the Chief Customer Officer, holding the first ever CCO role at Lands’ End, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker and Allstate Corporations.

Jeanne is also the author of the groundbreaking book, “Chief Customer Officer” (Jossey-Bass, 2006). The book was the first of its kind to address the role of the customer leadership executive. It quickly became a bestseller and has been translated into eight languages. Her second book, “I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad,” (Portfolio, 2001) was also a bestseller and translated into five languages. Her latest book, “Chief Customer Officer 2.0” (Wiley) was published in the UK on July 3rd, 2015.

Jeanne is a highly sought after speaker, keynoting high profile conferences and corporate events. She has spoken for speaking clients such as Intuit, Pella Windows, Staples, Activision, MetLife, Zappos, and AARP, and has appeared in major media outlets such as Fast Company, Forbes, MSNBC, The Associated Press and The Conference Board.

Jeanne lives in Los Angeles with her husband Bill.

You can also connect with Jeanne on Twitter @JeanneBliss and on LinkedIn here.

Photo Credit: Pim Stouten via Compfight cc