How to Connect Customer Experience to Business Growth

The work of the Chief Customer Officer is about building the business through the growth of customer profitability and company revenue.

In order to connect customer experience to business growth, you need to move past the classic quarterly sales goals, production goals or operational objectives as the only metrics to define how the business is doing. Customer growth and profitability metrics must be part of the mix, and connected clearly to customer experience to warrant investment of people, time and financial resources.

• 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?

You have to make and prove the case to gain executive and board support. Know that this is job number one.

To make this case, I suggest you spend time to understand the different accounting methods throughout your company and to learn how and if customers are valued, tracked, and accounted for. This will likely be disjointed, and it 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 successful CCO creates a partnership with the operating leaders and CFO to accomplish four things:

1. Establish a united approach for valuing customers
2. Create an understanding and value of how profitability grows through organic customer growth
3. Align the silos to do the math on customer profitability – profitability and revenue growth or loss due to growing or shrinking the customer asset
4. Identify the points in the customer experience lifecycle that grow or shrink customer profitability.