Customer

We are obsessing over roles and titles but they do make a difference. We have the Chief Customer Officer, the Chief Marketing Officer, the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Digital Officer. That is a whole lot of Chiefs.

Can some of these be blended? Can one person perform more that one role and lead more than one department?

“Could the discipline and competencies required to lead a company through a customer experience transformation be led from marketing, by the CMO?

“The answer is “yes, however…”  

“The reason for this answer is because Customer experience is a shift in how a company will and will not grow.  It affects leadership, operations, how people are hired, and how the company goes to market. 

“There are many successful CMOs who take on the dual role of change agent inside the organization to transform the business—essentially the CCO duties. Pacific Gas & Electric’s Laurie Giammona is both the CCO and CMO.  At Walgreen’s Graham Atkinson held both roles, as does Heather Carroll Cox at Citi.

“What these leaders did to be successful was to deliberately expand their skill sets, the knowledge of their teams, and their reach beyond traditional marketing tasks of brand-building and shaping. They reached within the organization to do the following:

• Establish relationships with leaders across the organization
• Translate the brand to operationally relevant actions aligned to the customer journey
• Unite leaders in changing behavior, language, and how they hold people accountable
• Became operationally relevant and facilitate change

“When the CMO is also the CCO his or her personal skill set must expand to include skills that may not be organic to marketing leadership skills traditionally developed.  That is why the answer to that question above is “yes, however…”

Source: Customer Experience | Can the CMO also be the CCO?