Customer Success

Chapter 15The Rise of the Chief Customer Officer

When organizations change, and especially when new ones appear, new titles tend to come along for the ride. Shortly after IT took its place of prominence in the enterprise, the title CIO started to become popular as well. Today, it's the norm. Any decent-sized company has a CIO. No one questions whether it's necessary or whether there's enough responsibility to justify the C. It's a given when you consider the technology dependence of virtually every company in the world and especially when you consider the liability involved in the protection of a company's key information. The existence of the cloud has only served to up the ante as it's become part of every company's IT infrastructure and the home of volumes of business-critical data. There's no doubt that CIOs are here to stay.

Time will tell if the same is true for the new title that's becoming part of the customer success landscape—chief customer officer (CCO). For all the reasons we've outlined earlier, customer success is certainly here to stay and most likely the same is true for the CCO title. But what does that title actually mean? What are the typical responsibilities? Why did it take the customer success movement to make it prominent? Let's explore.

Wikipedia defines chief customer officer this way: “A chief customer officer (CCO) is the executive responsible in customer-centric companies for the total relationship with an organization's customers.”

The Before Cloud ...