Avoiding Customer Efforts That Crash and Burn: Straight Talk From 'Chief Customer Officer'

Why do customer efforts crash and burn? Are you wrestling with customer leadership? What are you doing to match the commitment to the customer to the actions of the organization? And, is the CCO the solution?

Such questions are asked (and answered) in Jeanne Bliss's new book, Chief Customer Officer, a highly energetic, tell-it-like-it-is treatise on how to create and execute a customer-centric agenda. Her passion and battle scars are threaded throughout the book. Her recommendations have been vetted and tested in the real world, at some of the largest, most powerful companies in the world—Microsoft, Lands End, Allstate Insurance, among others.

As Bliss writes in the introduction, the book is about "reality." How to get the "customer thing" beyond cool coffee mugs, creative T-shirts, and rah-rah kickoffs. In a nutshell, the book is a road map to critically examining your own organization to determine whether a chief customer officer makes sense and the customer thing is achievable and worth it.

The book, summarized here for MarketingProfs readers, can help executives to better evaluate their personal role in driving the customer agenda, while helping functional leaders to create alliances and coalitions in executing some difficult cross-company changes.

Why Customer Efforts Crash and Burn

The author presents some compelling data that is inconsistent with companies' alleged focus on the customer. Some damaging statistics include the following:

• Up to two-thirds of all customers leave due to poor customer service.
  
  
• Between 32% and 94% of all customers right now are thinking of leaving.

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Michael L. Perla is a principal consultant at a sales and marketing consulting firm. He can be reached at michaelperla@bellsouth.net.