4 Non-Negotiable Traits of Customer-Focused CEOs

Fridays with Vistage is a webinar series on relevant, timely and actionable business topics to help you generate results in your business. On May 1, Michel Falcon will present, “6 Proven Ways to Innovate Your Customer Experience and Grow Your Business.”  You may register for it here.

To be customer-focused, a CEO must pay great attention to past, present, and future customer behaviors, motivations, and aversions.

This post was inspired by an email I received from one of my email subscribers, who asked,

“How do I get my CEO to focus more on the customer?’

Well, it’s not easy. CEOs either have customer-centricity in their DNA or they don’t. It’s difficult to train experienced executives to pivot and genuinely want to invest to improve their customer experience. These leaders may be accustomed to operating a certain way and asking them to change is difficult.

My newsletter subscriber continued by asking, “How can I tell if my CEO is customer-centric?”

Being focused on the customer requires certain traits if you want it to be organic and genuine. There are four traits that you must naturally possess.

They support their management team with a respectable operating budget

I recently hosted a keynote speaking engagement for customer experience management professionals. At this event, I asked the audience, “How many people believe they have a sufficient budget to improve their company’s customer experience?”

Only three out of nearly one hundred attendees raised their hand. This tells me that companies have acknowledged that they need someone to lead their customer experience programs, but they haven’t effectively given them an adequate budget.

Think of how much your organization invests in marketing, sales, and PR initiatives. Is the investment in customer experience equal to or greater than these other strategies? Customer-focused CEOs will ensure that their operational management teams are equipped with a budget that will help drive growth.

Tony Hsieh (Founder & CEO of Zappos) advocates spending more on improving the customer experience than traditional marketing. After all, the best way to grow a business is organically through referrals and repeat business. Zappos is a case study on how to do this.

They think long term

The ROI of some customer experience initiatives can take 6, 12, or even 24 months to come to surface. This is why Jeff Bezos says he is “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

I find that CEOs of publicly traded companies are less likely to invest to become more customer-centric because they have to answer to Wall Street, which demands an immediate ROI. For companies who are privately owned, they have the advantage of being able to grow slow.

An investment in customer experience isn’t always tangible, like investing in radio, television, or direct mail campaigns. We must be patient and grow long-lasting businesses slowly. Remember Groupon? They grew very fast, lost their customer focus, and are now a shell of what they used to be.

They genuinely want to engage with customers

I once met a CEO who said, “Michel, I don’t have the time to sit in my call center and listen to live calls.”

I’m very confident in my expertise, but not even I can help professionals who believe their schedules are too busy to listen to customers and speak with employees. As I mentioned earlier, CEOs either get it or they don’t. There are many affordable ways to engage with customers: host Customer Advisory Board meetings, listen to live calls with your contact centre team, or monitor your social media feeds.

My recommendation for any professional who wants to become customer-focused is to set a recurring meeting on your calendar for 30 minutes each week. During this time, choose a practice that will help you become closer to understanding your customers’ motivations, challenges, and aversions.

Good enough is no longer good enough

Whether your NPS score is 85, or you are consistently voted as a top customer service company in your industry, customer-focused CEOs aren’t ever satisfied with the level of service their company delivers to their customers.

If a customer-centric CEO sees that the company’s level of service has flatlined, they motivate their team to build new strategies to revitalize their service.  Many companies jump at the opportunity to invest in operational strategies that will increase their profile. Investing to improve your contact centre’s training program, or creating a complaint resolution system to increase customer retention, isn’t as attractive on the surface but will pay a much higher ROI.

CEOs like Richard Branson (Virgin) and Kat Cole (Cinnabon) are very forward with advocating their customer experience. They actively promote their customer experience to the media, to their customers, and to their employees. The outcome of this is tribes of team members, who want to exceed the expectations of both their CEO and their customers.

How can you become a more customer-focused CEO?

To learn more about being a customer-focused business leader, join me Friday, May 1, for a Fridays with Vistage webinar on “6 Proven Ways to Innovate Your Customer Experience and Grow Your Business.”  You may register for it here.

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