Although all companies have some type of Customer Service Department and some have adopted customer experience programs to measure and react to the data, most do not have an integrated approach to apply the learning across the organization and back into the marketplace. What gets in the way of integration? If customer programs are used at all, they are used and isolated within organizational silos. See if this sounds familiar. Marketing owns the Customer Satisfaction Survey, Operations owns the Mystery Shop Program, Market Research owns the Customer Intercepts and Human Resources owns the Employee Engagement Program. But who owns the customer relationship?

The reality is that marketers don’t do this with any other asset in their company. The COO makes sure that the widget is the sole focus of the company from raw material to distribution. The CFO makes sure that every bean is counted along that path and knows exactly what the effect of a bean spent in Silo One means to Silo Four. Perhaps it is time to introduce the CCO, the Chief Customer Officer.

Don’t laugh. We have a high ranking executive to champion every other asset in the company, but we don’t have one whose sole purpose is to look out for the, “most important asset.” Companies are already moving quickly into the area of Social Media and you will soon see the advent of the Chief Community Officer, so the development of this new C-suite position makes sense and should not be out of the realm of possibility.

If the customer is truly your company’s greatest asset, then stewarding that relationship has to be more than lip service. The customer experience has to have a seat in the board room and filter its way all the way through the organization as an integrated strategy focus. Now that would be walking the walk.