CIOs Need to Become Customer Champions

When asked by the Conference Board in 2005 to rank the challenges that keep them up at night, U.S.-based CEOs put customer loyalty and retention third overall, just behind steady top-line growth and consistent execution of strategy by top management. The three issues are linked, of course, which gets to the heart of why they’re perennial sore spots for CEOs. A company having problems consistently executing across leadership divisions is also likely to experience challenges delivering a cohesive customer experience—challenges that will have an impact on keeping and developing profitable customers.

The CIO is in a unique strategic position to help out—and, in the process, emerge as an unexpected customer champion. Cases of CIOs taking this position, in my opinion, are not prevalent enough and identify a missed opportunity to advance the organization’s quest for customer profits. Beginning with one immediately actionable example; understanding the value of gained and lost customers, the quantity of referrals and the movement of customers from one level of profitability to another should emerge as a key set of metrics. I call these the “Guerrilla Metrics” because they power the customer onto the corporate agenda – and will help the CEO determine the value of the corporation based on its ability to manage customers as assets. This requires enabling the integration of customer data and driving that as a priority.

Extending the role beyond the metrics for managing customers as assets, CIOs need to take a stronger hand in insisting that corporate plans begin from prioritized actions to improve customer experiences, with resources lining up to enable their successful implementation. In too many organizations, sales, marketing, operations, and service all run separately from one another and have their own perspective, processes, metrics, and requirements. Eventually, divisional problems show up at the feet of some poor fellow in the IT department. And because each problem is presented in a vacuum, the solution that’s applied is often cordoned off from the rest of the requirements, IT resources, and data-management imperatives critical to running a business. Traditionally, attempts to manage these disparate requests are dealt with on a quarterly basis. Resource allocations are made and placed in a queue that may be monitored by committee oversight. But too often, there’s little thought given to how these separate efforts will affect the customer experience.

My strong belief is that whoever leads the customer effort should do so in partnership with the CIO. Sadly, CIOs continue to be brought in too late in the game. Perhaps CIOs need to take the first move to ensure involvement in the customer mission. Rather than waiting for an invitation, seek out the customer leader and suggest a meeting of the minds on the priorities and objectives. The strongest partnerships I’ve experienced were when there was a genuine desire to build this collaborative partnership. So making this move yourselves is the key. Don’t wait for your CEO to band you together.

The CIO is in a unique position to draw connections between the relationships and outcomes their company wants to have with customers and how projects line up to achieve strategic objectives. To take a leadership role here, CIOs need to be active in determining how to manage customer-service issues holistically across the organization amid the mass of data that currently exists. This should be one of the key job descriptions of the CIO. To advance this role as customer champion, CIOs should partner with the company’s customer-service leadership to review priorities.

For example, at Mazda, in the infancy of CRM during the early 1990s, as senior manager, customer satisfaction and retention, I forged a strong partnership with the CIO and the IT department. Together, we managed to merge twenty-five separate databases, each built separately across the operation (warranty, service, parts, marketing, etc) into the first relational database in less than nine months. We did this sitting side by side, sloshing through the data; determining what was needed from each database, what common attributes were required from each to connect and align the business requirements and what IT actions would pull the triggers to deliver the desired outcomes for customers. As we got deeper and deeper into the work, the CIO and IT organization grew amazingly enthusiastic, offering ideas that often beat mine in creativity and potency. These IT team members became truly inspired custodians of the customer relationship.