I used to believe that the companies that established a Chief Customer Officer role in the last 5 years did it for the wrong reasons. Customer retention was simply a cost of acquiring new customers, and a price that was paid for with a check rather than action taken to address it daily.
Over time however costs associated with customer retention have increased and more people have come to realize the business impact of churn in part because companies are growing their revenue at a rate that is supposed to insulate the business from the impact of churn.
Today I believe that companies have come to realize the importance of having a Chief Customer Officer who is accountable for the customer experience, not just reporting or measuring the experience but ensuring that the right things happen for the customer.
So, they hire a CCO (or promote from within). They build a team. They add it to the organizational chart.
And then, in most cases, almost nothing changed.
Being a Chief Engineer was just a title. It was a senior role with a nice-sounding title but not much actual authority. Companies would promote the value of the Chief Engineer role to customers, but when it came time to discuss and agree on the generation of revenue, the Chief Engineer’s input was completely ignored. Who made the decisions regarding product development, the go-to-market strategy and due diligence for mergers and acquisitions if not the Chief Engineer?
The CCO Dilemma will challenge board members and CEOs in the years ahead, particularly in 2026.
A Chief Customer Officer without any real influence on the customer experience trajectory is simply a very expensive customer satisfaction rating.
The trouble with the world is not the people. It is the system that does not make the best of people.
The Customer Chief Officer (CCO) reports into the wrong person. The CEO makes all the important decisions; the CCO reports into the second tier. The Revenue Chief Officer (CRO) is accountable for the sales targets and the outcomes. The Product Chief Officer (CPO) is accountable for the products. The Marketing Chief Officer (CMO) is accountable for the brand and demand gen. The Operations Chief Officer (COO) is accountable for the delivery of the operational work. So, who is accountable for the customer satisfaction metrics, the renewal conversations and the quarterly NPS report that gets talked about for about 10 minutes at the board meeting?
Customer experience is considered a late process variable, an effect that shows up after a product has been developed, sold, marketed, manufactured and delivered to the customer with Customer Experience (CX) being considered an afterthought.
An Example of a Structural Error in Customer Experience The company Product develops a feature that will enable a car to stream video on a large screen inside the car. Sales determines how the feature will be sold, e.g. that it will be part of a new level of trim on a car model. Marketing then decides how they will advertise the feature to entice customers to buy the car. Operations figure out how to build and ship the car to customers. And then finally Customer Experience decides how it will try to mitigate customer dissatisfaction over what the customer has just been subjected to get the feature that the company wanted to sell to the customer in the first place.
The role described in this quote is not a customer strategy. Rather, it is a complaints management role that has been given a more glamorous title.
The reality is that almost every board is blind to the fact that a CCO that has no material impact within 100 yards of the customer will also have no material value to the business.
When I refer to “upstream”, I mean product prioritization, reducing sales motions to prevent churn, and shaping the decision-making that impacts the complexity of entry points and onboarding experiences for customers. I believe that a CCO that isn’t impacting net revenue retention (NRR) will always be viewed as one that is only improving customer satisfaction.
By 2026 there will be only two types of Community Connected Organization (CCO) in Medicaid. The first step in modernizing your health center is to figure out which one you have.
The Decorative CCO is there to look pretty. They are there to demonstrate to the rest of the organization that the business is customer centric. The Decorative CCO will typically be the leader of the Voice of Customer program, they will lead a team of success managers, report on the NPS to the Board and may even attend every all-hands to make sure that the message about the importance of customers is clearly articulated. They are usually very articulate, they mean well, but are often largely reactive. Most importantly they have zero influence on the key decisions that affect the customer.
A Decisive CCO is a different beast. The CCO now often sits right next to the CFO and CRO at the leadership table. They have formal authority and voting rights over nearly every aspect of a product and business including the actual features and functionality included in a product, the configuration of a commercial product package, the onboarding process and renewal terms and conditions among other things. The CCO now has direct authority over the NRRC (net revenue retention rate) a cold hard measurable number, versus some squishy relationship metrics that are often open to interpretation. Instead of reporting up to sales or marketing the CCO now reports directly to the CEO. And, more importantly, the CCO gets to weigh in on the overall product and business strategy at the very outset, before plans are formed and pricing decisions are made, so that they can help avoid the mess and costly re-pricing needed to entice customers to buy the things that the company is trying to sell.
The differential between these two business models is real and significant. Study after study has proven that the Customer Officer who has direct line responsibility for the entire customer experience has more customer loyalty, more account growth and more long-term enterprise value.
As a CEO or Board Member, here are 3 questions to ask about your Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) structure:
Here’s your first question: what can your Customer Champion change without asking anyone else for permission? If the answer is “not much at all” you’ve got a Decorative Customer Champion. To turn your Customer Champion into a real voice in your organization will take some serious changes to the way business is done, not necessarily an organizational shake-up, but a fundamental rethinking of where the customer voice shows up in the workflow.
Second: What metrics will the CCO be held accountable for? In our case, net revenue retention should be the North Star. While customer health scores are useful, being accountable solely for health scores is not enough. If your CCO is only held accountable for customer satisfaction metrics and not for meeting commercial targets, the CCO will be viewed as a cost center and not a business leader.
Third: At what stage in your planning cycle do you bring the customer perspective to bear? Companies expand into new markets, launch new products and services, change prices and make acquisitions on a regular basis. All these actions have a direct impact on customer experience. If the customer perspective is not factored in at the planning stage, these changes will need to be reversed or mitigated at the execution stage, at far greater cost. CCOs bring maximum value when they are engaged as early as possible in the planning cycle.
An interim Chief Customer Officer can be a key steppingstone for organizations who are not ready to embark on the permanent transformation required for a lasting change through the appointment of a Chief Customer Officer. An interim CCO can quickly establish the customer experience structure and infrastructure of an organization, identify the risks associated with key customer experience gaps in accountability that could lead to customer churn and educate the Board on what the future roles and structure of a CCO will look like.
This is not a compromise. This is smarter. The Interim CCO brings an objective and impartial perspective unencumbered by the politics, politics that inevitably surround the creation of a Chief Communications Officer. Focused on delivering clarity on time and on strategy, the Interim CCO does not have a horse in the race. In fact, by proving out the concept of an empowered CCO, it will be easier to determine what to look for in a permanent executive, and how to fairly and accurately evaluate candidates when you know precisely what to look for.
The CCO role isn’t inherently broken. It’s the company that puts the CCO in this role that’s broken.
Customer retention is now universally acknowledged as being at the heart of sustainable growth and elevating the role of the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) to be a figurehead customer experience advocate, rather than a full-time commercial business leader, is to take a bet that customer loyalty will win through in even the most dysfunctional of businesses.
That bet is becoming increasingly expensive to lose.
If a Board and a CEO treat the role of Chief Culture Officer as more than a ceremonial or structural title, they will find it to be one of the highest returns on investment of any role in their leadership team. Failing to do so will simply be paying for a reporting line rather than real impact.
The question is not whether your organization needs a Chief Customer Officer. The question is whether your current Chief Customer Officer has been given the authority to impact your bottom line.
Author: Sandrine Moreau
At International Executive Consulting, we excel in driving business transformation and organizational change - enhancing corporate performance while optimizing efficiency.