What comes before a full‐fledged CCO? In most startups, you'll start with a “jack of all trades” account manager position where people handle all customer issues from basic support all the way through to true customer success … and often some of these functions will be handled by the product team. Specialized roles and multiple teams (e.g., support vs. professional services) with their own managers will usually come before a full CCO, unless one of the company's founders happens to be playing that role.

Signs It's Time to Hire Your First CCO

You know it's time to hire a CCO when:

• You wake up in the middle of the night and realize you've never measured customer satisfaction—no Net Promoter Score, no basic customer satisfaction survey, no product engagement levels, nothing.
• You are spending too much of your own time putting out customer fires rather than thinking about how to make customers more successful by using your product.
• Your Board asks you which of your customer segments is the highest margin, or has the most opportunity, and you don't have a great answer and aren't sure how to get to one.

When a Fractional CCO Might Be Enough

A fractional CCO may be the way to go if you have a relatively contained/small customer success/account management organization, but it is already very diverse in its sub‐functions (support, account management, success, professional services) and none of the team leaders of those teams have the range of experience to orchestrate the handoffs and synergies across the sub‐functions.

What Does Great Look Like in a CCO?

Ideal startup Chief Customer Officers do three things particularly well:

1. They are the primary evangelist across your executive team—and entire organization—on, as George writes in this Part, doing the job the customer is hiring you to do. In non‐professional service businesses where the bulk of the organization is not face‐to‐face with customers on a regular basis, it can be very easy for employees, teams, and projects to quickly become internally focused. The great CCO is the one who brings the Outside In, every day.
2. They are equal parts quantitative and qualitative. Almost all high‐level work that the CCO and their team do includes math: Net Promoter Score analysis; customer segmentation; customer profitability. The CCO must nail these, and if partnering with the CFO or someone else, at least be fluent in them. And the greatest CCOs are also the ones with the most customer empathy, and the ability to relate that feeling to others in the company, and to other customers. They can recite customer experiences stories like a politician giving a stump speech.
3. They like designing processes. Account management, customer success, support, onboarding, professional services, knowledge management—all the different teams reporting to a CCO—must work together in a seamless way to apply their specific areas of expertise to bring general solutions to the customer. The head of the team, the CCO, must be a rock star at process envisioning and design, and at engaging teams in the process. Otherwise, the teams will be inefficient, hand‐offs will be missed, there will be no single source of truth, and customers will not be well served.

Signs Your CCO Isn't Scaling

CCOs who aren't scaling well past the startup stage are the ones who typically:

• Throw bodies at things like support instead of making processes more automated or efficient. This is true of other functions I've written about in other chapters of this book (Accounting, for example), but it's particularly important in Customer Success. As a company scales and takes on more customers, especially if the product team spends their building more new features and functions rather than automating internal tools or sunsetting old product modules, the support burden can get out of hand. And while sometimes, sure, it may make sense to open up a massive support location offshore, that may be just a less expensive way of avoiding a process redesign or system implementation.
• Fail to specialize the department as it grows. Just as a startup scales from its founding team as generalists, capable of pitching in on everything, to more specialized roles running different functional areas, CCOs have to grow their teams by increasing specialized roles. It's easy to get stuck in a pattern of hiring and training expensive generalists because they're really good, and they don't require a lot of training. It's much harder to break a role down into two or three smaller roles, figure out how to career path existing generalists into the more specialized roles, and redesign systems and processes to execute better and more efficiently.

How I Engage with the CCO

A few ways I've typically spent the most time with or gotten the most value out of CCOs over the years are:

• In person at “canary in the coal mine” customers. I always find that the largest clients, the most demanding ones, the ones who push you around, are the ones who make your company a better company. At Return Path, we had those types of clients over the years, from eBay, to DoubleClick, to Microsoft, to Groupon, to Facebook, to Bank of America. The demanding customer is the one who breaks things and forces you to own up to your lack of scalability. They also either take you to task or threaten to pull their business if you don't clean up your act. As painful as some of those meetings are, they are also ones I always wanted to attend in person with my CCO, both so I could eat whatever form of crow needed to be eaten as the Chief Crow Eater (which sends a very powerful message to the customer), and so the CCO and I could experience the chirping of the canary in the coal mine and learn from the experience together.
• Understanding the base. As the old saying from the hardware world goes, “God was able to create the world in only seven days because he didn't have an installed base.” The new world of Internet technologies, SaaS, and agile development is one where your installed base of customers is your biggest asset, not a millstone around your neck. Some of the most meaningful experiences I had over the years with our CCOs was to be in market, spending time with all kinds of customers together in small groups and large ones, deeply understanding their needs and use of our product.