Delivering on the customer-first experience is increasingly seen as a job for the c-suite to deliver
The importance of delivering customer experiences is increasingly one of the highest priorities for chief executives with customer retention and experience ranking higher than sales and revenue as their primary concern.
In a recent report by software management company Calabrio, 100% of the 844 UK and US-based business executives including 350 chief executives ranked customer experience as their companies major focus, with only 58% saying the same for sales and revenue.
“It is clear that the customer is paramount to success,” said Tom Goodmanson, president and CEO at Calabrio. “But the challenge comes in understanding how customers interact with businesses, particularly when it comes to the contact center.”
With customer retention and sentiment now a key measurement of the customer experience, the overwhelming response of the study illustrates that the role of the chief commercial officer as a marketer is gaining momentum.
In the UK, 57% of respondents attribute the rise of the chief commercial officer to a growing need among B2B marketers for extra support and technology expertise. In fact, the study found that this was the top reason for justifying the need for chief commercial officer function today.
“The challenge to ensure businesses are gathering accurate customer insights as a rich source of business intelligence, and secondly to understand how this data can be used to inform wider business improvement and customer engagement strategies,” Goodmanson said.
The importance of delivering exceptional customer experiences has hit home with executives with more than half (52%) of senior leadership view customer experience as the most important way of differentiating their brand, but chief executives who participated in the survey still show a lack of clear customer ownership with only 37% of chief executive officers making it their personal priority to improve customer experiences.
With nearly half (47%) of chief marketing officers surveyed noting that although they do have the right tools in order to understand their customers’ greatest challenges, only 29% of claimed ownership. Looking further across the c-suite, only 37% of chief executive officers stake a claim on improving customer experiences.