Studies Reveal Need for Common C-suite Language to Grow Customer-activated Enterprise

Three weeks ago, I was sitting in a room full of CIOs and IT leaders discussing the importance of C-suite alignment. I was attending our client, the Society for Information Management (SIM)’s, annual SIMposium, and the CIOs in attendance were reviewing the results of the 2013 IT Trends Survey.

A surprising conclusion of the IT Trends Survey was the divergence in priorities between IT leaders and other C-suite executives. The chart below shows the top five personal concerns of IT leaders as compared to those of their business organizations.

Only five of the senior IT leaders’ most important IT management concerns appear in the top 10 list of their organizations’ concerns. The remaining top five personal concerns are more tactical and operational with a very clear IT rather than business focus.

Lead investigator, Leon Kappelman, noted that many of the tactical activities are essential to keep the lights on, and the perceived misalignment may really be an understandable and appropriate divergence; indeed, security won’t likely be mentioned as an imperative for customer growth, but a breach in security will erode customer confidence and curtail if not halt customer growth. But a common C-suite language could help to foster alignment.

CMOs Face Similar Challenges in Aligning with C-suite Peers

CMOs are all too familiar with the challenges of alignment, documented well in the Economist Intelligence Unit Survey, “Outside looking in: The CMO struggles to get in sync with the C-suite.”

The Economist identifies the disconnect over marketing’s priorities with non-marketing C-suite executives seeing marketing’s top priority as driving revenue by a wide margin over finding new customers/leads (30% vs. 19%). For CMOs, however, marketing’s priorities are creating new products/services and customer acquisition and driving revenue ranks third.

The truth is that each practice area (CIO, CFO, CHRO, CMO) is able to impact the customer experience, and the primary barrier to shared success is the willingness to be transparent and to have a common C-suite language to track and measure progress against this customer objective.

IBM says: Unified C-suite is 28 Percent More Likely to Outperform

IBM, in its latest C-suite study of 4,000 executives, provides a solution to the alignment problem. In brief, writes Virginia M. Rometty, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of IBM, “Leaders’ priorities are shifting from intra-enterprise efficiency and productivity to a new agenda led by the front office and focused on extra-enterprise engagement, transparency, collaboration and dialogue with audiences and all the individuals within them.

“(Rather than working in silos), C-suite leaders are working together to address the attendant challenges and opportunities, which were barely discernible a decade ago. In two-thirds of the organizations that outperform their peers, leaders are not just managing customer experiences; they are reorienting their organizations, strategies, and investments to cultivate contemporary relationships across all manner of customer interactions.”

Recognizing the changes in customer expectations, IBM suggests that CxOs are adjusting priorities in the next three to five years as follows:

Common C-suite Language with a Customer Focus Can Accelerate Performance

The new focus on the customer impact of all activities gives the C-suite a common language to discuss initiatives and assess progress.

To unify the C-suite in this effort, the language and reporting needs to change from competency focused to customer focused, showing how each area delivers on:

• Customer engagement


• Customer engagement


• Customer service/satisfaction


• Customer growth


• Customer advocacy/collaboration

What does this language look like?

• Rather than documenting the number of leads or new collateral pieces, CMOs will report on customer engagement, acquisition, and growth, tracking lead flow through to sales via today’s analytics (Customer Engagement, Acquisition and Growth).


• Rather than reporting on SLAs, CIOs will report on the satisfactory completion of online services requests including online transactions (Customer Acquisition or Customer Service).


• Rather than reporting on pipeline growth, sales will report on growth of revenue per customer (Customer Growth).


• Rather than reporting on the number of service/support queries handled, Product Development will report on testimonials and referrals from customers who assisted in the collaborative development of new offerings (Customer Advocacy and Collaboration).

Success will come to those who break down silos to integrate all aspects of an organization’s people, partners, processes, and technology to deliver superior customer experiences across all engagement channels.

Where is your organization at in this process? What’s standing in the way of progress?

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