customer

Updating your C-suite: Here’s why you need a chief customer officer

March 26, 2016 By Carol Humphreys

GUEST:

The customer always comes first. It’s a saying companies throw around a lot, but they rarely live and breathe it the way they should. It can be easy to forget what’s most important when you’re juggling finances, logistics, investors, and beyond. But there’s a way to keep your customer top of mind no matter what: Make an addition to your C-Suite by empowering a chief customer officer.

It’s a move many of America’s largest companies have made over the last couple of years, driven by the need to differentiate. To boil it down, the chief customer officer (CCO) serves as a top executive with the responsibility of designing, orchestrating, and improving customer experience in a way that impacts all levels of your brand. Progressive companies across a range of industries — from Dunkin Donuts to PNC Bank — have empowered CCOs to build an organization that puts the customer first. At its core, this means dedicating your business to ensuring the voice of the customer is heard and acted upon across the organization.

In an era of heightened customer expectations — in which every customer is also a broadcaster — having a CCO is essential. As with any new role within your company, it’s important to establish responsibilities for your CCO and empower them to hit the ground running.

Here are the top five responsibilities your chief customer officer should take on:

1. Establish a clear vision for customer experience

First and foremost, your CCO will be responsible for establishing a clear vision for customer experience. Striving for great customer experiences isn’t enough anymore. It’s too vague, says little about your company and, counter-intuitively, often leads to muddled, less than great experiences. Your CCO will be able to unpack what great customer experiences actually look like for your business, establishing an authentic company voice and setting clear standards for engaging with customers.

With an understanding of what customer experience looks like for your particular brand, your CCO should set aspirational goals and a roadmap to execute against.

2. Pick an organizational model that can be successful in your business

There are three types of organizational models that businesses typically put in place to support the CCO. In the first model, the CCO directly manages the people, programs, and budget for all customer-focused initiatives. In the second model, the CCO is an evangelist/change agent within the company and makes changes through influence and alliance with teams, particularly when it comes to budget and program authority. The third model is a hybrid of the first two, with the CCO being part of a function (typically marketing or operations) but working across a wider range of teams.

Any of the above models can be successful, depending on how they are implemented. The key is for the CCO to show enterprise results in the areas of loyalty, satisfaction, and profitability.

3. Give customers a voice in all company initiatives

For employees that don’t engage with customers on a regular basis, it can be difficult to grasp how customer feedback plays a role in everything from daily tasks to large projects. But the truth is, customer experience should be top of mind for all departments — from finance and billing to marketing and sales. That’s where your chief customer officer comes in.

CCOs can come from different walks of life — there is no specific career path that CCOs need to have followed to be successful. Many come from an operational background, often earlier in their careers, working in customer-facing roles in sales, support, or regional operational management roles. Others come from marketing and/or insights roles, helping companies qualify and quantify the voice of the customer.

Whoever takes on the role of chief customer officer should be prepared to bring customer feedback to the table, prioritizing initiatives to improve the customer experience, and clearly explaining how customer insights relate to each individual department. Your CCO should aggregate insights from multiple sources — social platforms, call centers, forums — to create a comprehensive overview of customer feedback and how each department impacts those statistics.

Once each department has a clear understanding of its role in customer experience, your CCO should work with each department on initiatives and act as a customer representative in all matters. Ultimately, the CCO is responsible for driving a new way of thinking from the C-suite to the frontline and back-office employees, always giving the customer a seat at the table for every new initiative.

4. Be proactive

It is the responsibility of the chief customer officer to bring a proactive approach to customer experience management. CCOs need to help their teams get in front of issues by instating simple guidelines for engaging with customers. With a CCO in your arsenal and a broader customer experience management team to back them up, your team will be able to proactively communicate with customers about new products, policies, and processes.

Service recovery should be less of a priority as customer insights are used to create and innovate better solutions before they cause issues. In other words, your CCO will be able to mitigate potential issues before they arise by incorporating customer feedback at all levels of business.

5. Share results with the entire company

Most importantly, the chief customer officer is responsible for educating their peers and the rest of the organization on the value of being a customer-centric company. As your CCO and customer engagement management team bring their customer experience roadmap to life, they’ll share successes, failures, and everything in between. It’s important that the entire company have a clear understanding of what the CCO hopes to accomplish and that updates on progress are given on a regular basis. Seeing is believing, which is why the CCO will need to share insights and achievements as often as possible.

With such an increased focus on customer experience, the CCO role will likely become more and more common. In the meantime, early adopters — those who truly understand the importance and power of the customer — will lead the charge in shaping this new C-suite role and will, no doubt, have a leg up on the competition.

Sid Banerjee is executive chairman of Clarabridge.

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Google responds to Facebook threat, releases Analytics 360 Suite for easier customer tracking

March 15, 2016 By Carol Humphreys

ANALYSIS:

Google released a new version of its Google Analytics product this morning, adding new features and bringing in existing offerings that previously worked separately. Marketers can use the suite to track and respond to their customers more seamlessly than ever before. Above all, it’s a response to the growing threat by Facebook.

In the past year or two, Google had already released several of the features of what today is being branded Google Analytics 360 Suite. But the new release debuts several new features, including most significantly what appears to be a data management platform (DMP) to manage user profile data across a company’s site — a critical tool for large companies. This is where Facebook has come on very strong, particularly in the explosive mobile advertising market.

Google has brought these features into one place, giving enterprise-size marketers a much more powerful feedback loop: These marketers can now get data about customers coming to their site and respond more easily in real time with content that is specialized for those visitors.

With the new features, Google also appears to be encroaching on the territory of several big players in the enterprise data cloud or DMP space — for example, Oracle and Adobe. It also steps into A/B testing, where Optimizely is dominant, and data visualization, where Tableau has seen tremendous growth.

Google’s moves are significant, because it has the advertising reach and infrastructure scale to undermine many of these other players. Google said it’s applying the same infrastructure that allows it to handle billions and billions of daily search queries — generating answers before users even finish typing — to give enterprise marketers similar functionality. In this case, it means allowing marketers to provide their customers with the content, offers, or products that users are likely looking for, based on those customers’ past behaviors.

Facebook’s growing threat

The move is also significant because Facebook continues to grow in mobile, now threatening Google’s longtime dominance in display advertising. Google has chugged along with many of its analytics products for years, but has never pulled them together to offer a powerful suite for marketers.

Jon Cifuentes, an analyst at VB Insight, VentureBeat’s research arm, agreed: “Google is above all a marketing and advertising company — with channel dominance in search, email, display — with mobile and display threatened for the first time in years with Facebook, especially around mobile. It makes sense for them to beef up audience tracking.”

Google cited Pawan Divakarla, who leads analytics at Ohio-based Progressive Insurance, as an example of the suite’s significance:

“The Google Analytics 360 Suite gave us the really big ah-ha moment. When we launched our mobile app, it provided insurance quotes. But after looking at the data, we saw people were attempting to buy insurance. So, we shifted our mobile strategy to offer ecommerce. Google gave us that insight,” Divakarla said in a canned quote in Google’s announcement.

The new suite certainly rivals Facebook in terms of tracking people across devices and channels. But more than that, it integrates with other products like AdWords, DoubleClick, and third-party platforms through an API.

Above: Google Analytics 360 dashboard image shows integration.

The suite comes with the following six products. The first four are brand new, Google says.

1. Google Audience Center 360 (beta)

This data management platform (DMP) helps marketers understand their customers and find more like them across channels, devices, and campaigns. It offers native integration with Google and DoubleClick, plus it’s open to third-party data providers and DSPs.

Significance: This could be the strongest update of the announcement. Facebook launched its Atlas product last year, built on social profile data that’s become hugely valuable. Google doesn’t have the profile data that Facebook has built, and it’s clearly been threatened by becoming an underdog in user data for the first time. But Google does have dominance in search traffic and data, and its Android platform is the biggest operating system in mobile. Finally, it has Gmail, through which it can build audiences and segments to be marketed to.

When it comes to impact on Adobe or Oracle, that remains to be seen. Google is a marketing and ad company, Adobe is a content-focused company, and Oracle is trying to serve enterprise with everything. There are overlaps, but each offer different use cases. With this announcement, Google is definitely getting more competitive for enterprise customers.

2. Google Optimize 360 (beta)

This website testing and personalization product helps marketers deliver better experiences. Marketers can show consumers multiple variations of their site and then choose the version that works best for each audience.

Significance: At first, this may look like a rebrand of Google Experiments, which helped people track analytics behind different A/B test pages. But that was done essentially through a tag, in a very manual way. Optimize does all of the work of setting up a real A/B test from end-to-end. You can literally drag comps of a site (without needing to know coding) into the product and test them out with live users.

By adding this feature and the Data Studio feature below, Google could be taking a lot of work away from A/B testing tools Optimizely and other personalization tools. It’s also incorporating customization and data visualization — creating a seamless stack that could spark consolidation in the industry. Visualization of data is very difficult to do within Optimizely. And if you have to switch to a tool like Tableau for data visualization, that becomes yet another piece to connect to your product stack. Why bother, if you can get it all from Google?

Having multiple tools from many vendors can also affect your IT development time, and even stability: If one tool goes down, and other tools that are dependent on it also go down, it’s often hard to find the cause of failure.

That said, Google’s A/B testing still doesn’t appear to match the full functionality of Optimizely for split testing.

3. Google Data Studio 360 (beta)

This new data analysis and visualization product integrates data across all suite products and other data sources — turning it into interactive reports and dashboards. Built-in real-time collaboration and sharing is based on Google Docs technology.

Significance: Marketers will find Data Studio helpful because they need to constantly make data imagery for briefings, reports, and decks. Google hasn’t done this before. In some ways, the product looks like a competitor to Cyfe or Geckoboard. Data visualization dashboards are hot right now, and a lot of innovation and venture dollars have been invested here. This could spell trouble for some of the newer entrants. The question is whether the new Google visualizations are deep enough to seriously affect a player like Tableau. This is something we haven’t looked at yet.

4. Google Tag Manager 360

Built from Google’s tag management product, this offers enterprise marketers a simplified way to gather site information (all those tiny bits of code) and powerful APIs to increase data accuracy and streamline workflows, to allow them to move faster and make decisions with confidence.

Significance: This was based on a small feature in GA, but was never a fully built-out and standalone product.

5. Google Analytics 360, rebrand of GA Premium

Google said it will roll out “exciting” new capabilities throughout the next couple of months as investments continue to grow. Sources are telling VentureBeat to wait until Google’s I/O event for more news. GA 360 will serve as the measurement centerpiece by analyzing customer data from all touchpoints and integrating with its ad products to drive marketing effectiveness, Google said.

Significance: This is really just a rebrand of GA Premium — not much new here. But Google really is the king of analytics.

6. Google Attribution 360, rebrand of Adometry

Google says this has been rebuilt from the “ground up” to help advertisers value marketing investments and allocate budgets with confidence. Marketers can analyze performance across all channels, devices, and systems to achieve their most effective marketing mix. VentureBeat’s understanding, though, is that Google still heavily relies on Tune and Kochava for some mobile attribution capabilities. Google’s main strength has been attribution for display advertising.

Significance: This is just a rebrand of Adometry. Nothing new here.