Alex Mead

THE ROLE ITSELF

What does a Chief Customer Officer actually own?

A Chief Customer Officer owns every interaction a customer has with the company once marketing has finished: contact, service, resolution, retention, and the revenue those produce. That means the people, the technology, the outsourcing contracts and the profit and loss account. Without budget, systems and hiring authority, the title is influence rather than ownership.

Answered by Alex Mead. The dated record behind this answer.

How it is actually done

There are five things the role has to hold. Hold four of them and you have a difficult job. Hold three and you have a title.

1. The interaction estate

Every channel a customer can reach the company through, and the front door in front of all of them. Call, chat, messaging, callback, web, email and increasingly video. Not a subset, and not the digital ones only, because customers do not experience channels, they experience one company.

2. The operating model

The people, the sites and the partners. At IAG I ran more than 4,000 people across 12 sites and 20 languages. At Rentokil Initial the group operation was around 4,000 people, with City Link around 2,000 of it. Numbers on that scale are not the point in themselves. The point is that the person accountable for the customer has to be the person who can move the operation, or nothing happens.

3. The technology that serves customers

CRM, contact platform, workforce management, quality, knowledge, and the integrations into core systems where the answers actually live. Not a seat on someone else's steering committee. Ownership of the roadmap, or the customer strategy becomes a document that describes systems nobody will change.

4. The outsourcing contracts

If partners answer your customers, the contracts belong to the customer function. Signature, commercial terms, service levels and the right to consolidate. When procurement owns them and the customer owns the outcome, the outcome loses every time.

5. The profit and loss account

At Total CX I was Chief Executive Customer Officer with the profit and loss in my name, and took the business from 75 to more than 400 people at 150% of plan. At D360 Bank I built the customer operation from zero as customer employee number one, and it went from nothing to 2 million customers in six months against a target of 500,000, then past 3 million within the year at more than 90% CSAT. Neither of those is an advisory outcome. They happened because the accountability and the authority sat in the same chair.

EPIC CSX AND TIME EX, AUTHORED 2012Thirty six customer capabilities and twenty employee principles. What the customer needs from every interaction, and what the employee needs in order to deliver it. Both rebuilt from scratch for the GenAI era.

The five questions to ask before taking the job

  • Does the contact operation report to me, including the outsourced part of it?
  • Can I hire, and can I move money between lines without a sponsor?
  • Do the partner contracts sign in my name?
  • Do I own the service technology roadmap, or only a seat at its review?
  • Am I in the room where the trading numbers are discussed, or only in the one where the survey scores are?

Five yes answers and the role is real. Anything less and the honest job title is Head of Persuasion.

What most companies get wrong about this

  1. They create the title without the budget. The person can persuade and cannot change anything, so the good ones leave inside eighteen months and the company concludes the role does not work.
  2. They split contact from experience. One team runs the centre on cost, another runs the journey on sentiment, and neither of them owns whether the customer got what they wanted.
  3. They put the role under marketing, so accountability ends at the sale, which is precisely the point at which the customer relationship begins.
  4. They ask for a customer strategy and keep every operational decision in operations, which produces a strategy that is agreed by everyone and implemented by no one.
  5. They judge the role on survey scores rather than on revenue retained and grown, and then cannot explain to the board what the function is for.

Related questions, and the proof behind the answers

How do you turn a contact centre from a cost centre into a revenue engine?Read the answer How do you measure customer experience so it predicts revenue rather than reporting the past?Read the answer How do you cut the cost of a customer operation without damaging service?Read the answer 46 named senior references, published verbatimProof, not description
About the author

Alex Mead is a customer contact, service and experience executive who runs those operations as revenue engines and builds the AI that runs them. Twenty five years, six sectors and thirty countries, leading teams from 75 to more than 4,000 people, with full operating accountability rather than an advisory seat. He is available now for a permanent or interim Chief Customer Officer, VP, Director or Head of Customer Contact, Service and Experience role.

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