Author: Mark Atterby

In 2003 there were fewer than 30 CCOs in the world. By 2010 there were 450 executives worldwide with the title. Now there’s 10s of 1000s scattered across the globe working in almost every industry sector. What is the career background of these new executives and what skills and attributes are required for them to be successful? The role of CCO has arisen largely as a response to the increasing importance placed on customer experience by corporations. CCOs sit alongside the other executives to represent the customers perspective and to ensure the customer is at the heart of every executive…

Jo Kelly, Chief Customer Officer for Good2Give, explains how great employee experiences create great customer experiences. Good2Give is a digital platform that facilitates charitable giving between corporations and charities. Good2Give’s customers are segmented into three levels of corporate clients, donors, and charities. They help companies run their workplace giving programs, manage employee donations and provide advice on how corporates and charities can work together to support their communities. Since 2001, Good2Give has facilitated $225 million to more than 8,000 Australian and international communities. Jo’s role at Good2Give encompasses a broad range of tasks and responsibilities. ‘I look after everything involved…

Research tells us that most companies who spend more time listening and responding to customer feedback grow faster than companies that don’t. However, drawing a line to connect actions based on customer feedback to financial performance is a significant challenge. In the broadest sense CX data refers to data and information an organisation collects about its customers. It can include customer feedback from surveys and focus groups, transactional data from past purchases and billing, or it can be information gathered from customer complaints and enquiries. A recent research report from Gartner shows a strong correlation between companies with positive revenue…

In her role as Head of Customer Experience for FairVine Super, Rachel Hamlen believes it is vital to have a growth mindset and to always be prepared to learn something new. She says, “As soon as you stop learning you stop growing, you become a dinosaur. Rather than saying I can’t do that, I don’t know that, or that’s not my thing – if you’re job presents something new, learn as much about it as you can.” That eagerness to learn and grow has greatly helped Rachel in her career and to tackle numerous challenges. “I started my career doing…

How do the basic principles of customer experience stand-up when consumers and employees are going through a period of crisis? Will brands who excel at it have a better chance of survival than those that don’t? In Australia and across the globe, people are extremely anxious as the spread of Covid 19 escalates. They’re worried about their health and the wellbeing of their loved ones. But they’re also worried about their financial future. The panic buying of toilet paper, pasta and so on is a result of this anxiety. It is not logical. The majority of panic buyers most probably…

CX executives need to maintain a delicate balancing act between various and often competing priorities. They need to make critical decisions about their customers, their customer needs and which projects to initiate to address those needs. To make those decisions they need to ask some very difficult questions. In their CX and CRM primer, Gartner highlights how most CX leaders need ask themselves the following questions: 1: How do I prioritise the competing demands of improving existing experiences and developing new ones? No organisation has unlimited resources to allocate to CX projects. For most organisations competing objectives and opportunities need…

Emma Cornwell, Chief Customer Officer for the myHomecare Group, is passionate about creating value and seamless communication channels for customers. Commencing her career in sales, in the automotive and publishing industries, Emma has worked for a number of organisations across a range of industries. She reflects, “Later I started a position at the NRMA, then I worked for Weight Watchers and finally I started working in home care services. My roles varied greatly within these organisations but they all involved helping to build brands and transitioning organisations from being monopolies to operating in highly competitive markets”. The one thing that…

Applying AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) to customer and marketing analytics has the potential to drive substantial value and benefits. Yet the success of applying these sophisticated tools, so far, has been somewhat mixed. The gulf between those companies who have been successful to those who have been disappointed in the results is likely to widen as the technology and its deployment matures. The holy grail of CX is to obtain a “360 Degree View of the Customer”. The 360-degree customer view is the idea that companies can know everything about their customers by aggregating data from every customer touchpoint. The…

As companies pour resources into CX projects and initiatives they want to know the success of their efforts. The use of NPS (Net Promoter Score), CES (Customer Effort Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) to measure CX have come to dominate. Many business leaders, however, have come to question this over reliance on these metrics and their usefulness to help improve revenue and profitability. Over the last two decades, NPS has become the go to customer metric for many organisations. Libby Dale, co-founder of SmartMeasures, comments, “NPS’s popularity is due to the fact that it is an easy question to ask…

When it comes to hiring temporary or casual customer service staff, companies often face a difficult balancing act in terms of speed of hire versus quality of hire. Unfortunately, the hiring methods that many organisations use are slow, expensive and deliver inconsistent results. Weploy, a Melbourne based startup, aims to eradicate the inefficiencies inherent in traditional hiring methods by providing businesses with a fast, seamless and compliant online hiring solution. Recruiting temporary customer service staff can be expensive and time consuming. One position can attract hundreds if not thousands of online applications, which means hours spent pouring over resumes and…