Why Won’t the C-Level Support Your Customer Experience Strategy?

As Curtis Bingham, founder and executive director of the CCO Council, explained at the 2012 Customer Experience Summit, the connection between customer loyalty is not an innovative assertion.

The connection is obvious, and it is supported with decades of anecdotal and empirical research. If you increase the level of customer loyalty, you will increase your opportunity for driving business.

Why, then, do so many customer experience and marketing leaders complain about a lack of C-level buy-in? Why do they feel that their attempts to excite customers and reclaim market dominance are being thwarted by a lack of organizational attention, resources and investment?

Why do they not feel empowered to achieve their objectives?

In order to answer the question, customer management professionals need to turn their eyes to the nearest mirror.

No matter how frustrating C-level inertia can seem, when the "business folks" do not "get it," the burden falls on the customer management leaders—not a mythical conception of "common sense"—to change that reality.

Sane executives did not rise the corporate ranks by killing cash cows and running away from positive ROI. They did not advance by downplaying the importance of the customer. If they oppose a customer experience strategy, it is not because they do not understand the connection between loyalty and revenue but rather because they do not see the proposed strategies as pathways to achieving either.

And if that is the case, the question turns to why you, the customer management leader, are not facilitating that understanding.

Certainly no condemnation of the hard work customer management and marketing leaders devote to their duties, the aforementioned statement is instead a question of the degree to which these leaders are functioning correctly and strategically.

As is the case in any other business function, especially one perceived as a pure, internalized cost unless proof comes otherwise, success in customer management does not come from operating within the confines of a "customer" bubble. Customer management professionals must operate with a strict alignment to the objectives of the greater business.

That means the old "run your department like a business " adage is unequivocally true. Customer management leaders must certainly focus on improving loyalty and satisfaction, but they must do so with fingers on the pulse of the greater business. If their customer-centric efforts begin and end with customer satisfaction scores and have no ties to the risk management and revenue/profit about which stakeholders ultimately care, their efforts are not, in fact, successful.

Until they get on board with that approach, customer management leaders are not achieving their objectives.

Paul Hagen of Forrester Research cites a chief customer officer who notes that his focus cannot be on "Kumbaya" initiatives. It is not about creating an amazing workplace culture or going overboard with smiles, laughs and kind gestures to the audience…unless those endeavors improve progress against the overall business objectives.

The connection between customer loyalty and revenue might be obvious, but failing customer management leaders are actually falling one step short of that connection. Instead of implementing customer-facing strategies on the basis of their proven connection to the bottom line, they are often only focusing on strategies that, theoretically, improve customer loyalty. If the strategies pan out, they might very well have an impact on revenue, but when customer management professionals treat "satisfaction" as the end and profitability or risk reduction as fortuitous extra credit, they are not operating in a way that will attract C-level buy-in.

They are not achieving their role within the business, and so their bubble will remain in isolation with needs and ideas that remain foreign and unjustified to the stakeholders who make business decisions.

Instead of approaching a strategy from the mindset of, "Wouldn’t it be cool for our customers if we did (insert strategy)," a customer management leader after legitimate buy-in asks, "Wouldn’t we generate more revenue if achieved (insert customer or efficiency outcome) by doing (insert strategy)?" That extra level of analysis is critical because it speaks a language the rest of the business can understand. It escapes the meaningless "Kumbaya" philosophy.

A pivotal element of stepping outside the customer management bubble and holding oneself to the benchmarks and objectives of the overall business is escaping the "us vs. them" philosophy. Far too often, individuals within a specific business unit (not just customer management) start to see the C-level and other stakeholders as their enemies in battle. As a result, their instinct is to defend their strategies at all costs.

This defensive, "us vs. them" mindset cripples the business unit and the business at large. It causes teams to lose perspective of what truly defines success, and when they cannot perform against that benchmark, it furthers the wedge between the business unit and the business’ stakeholders.

Individuals succumbing to such a mindset will, for example, tout high levels of social media followers and conversation rather than social’s footprint on the greater business out of fear that if they cannot show some success, their social budgets will be stripped. They lose sight of using social as a tool to drive revenue through increased engagement and loyalty, and they only exacerbate the C-level’s skepticism.

Instead, the customer management professionals should work with the greater business to figure out how to maximize social’s impact on the actual business. The C-level is not blameless here—excessively short leashes absolutely cripple a department’s comfort in "failing"—but as long as the customer management leader demonstrates a true commitment and connection to the business’ big picture objectives, he will have a better chance of stakeholder support.

If a C-suite is going to accept failure or slow progress, it will at least need to see a clear link between the strategic initiative and a key business objective. If it views the strategy as a self-serving, bubble-wrapped "customer management" initiative, it is far more likely to scrutinize.

With good reason.