With all the belt-tightening prompted by current economic conditions, developing a lucid, actionable customer strategy across all divisions of an organization has become ever more critical. For some businesses this means appointing a C-level executive devoted to the customer, which is prompting the continued rise of the chief customer officer (CCO). The challenge, however, is that many CCOs have a big title but little clout.

"The CCO provides the missing link among C-level peers for accountability for customers, which has a direct bearing on revenue, operational excellence, and shareholder value," says Curtis N. Bingham, president of the Predictive Consulting Group. Without a unified vision, Bingham says, marketing becomes less focused, sales less efficient, and customer service is haphazard at best.

"The position is potentially very important in the current economy, because organizations are increasingly tasked with getting the most as they can out of their customers," says Colin Shearer, senior vice president, strategic analytics at SPSS.

On paper, he says, it makes sense that most companies would want to have someone in charge of coordinating its customers' needs, "but the level of support these executives are given quite often leaves something to be desired." One problem is that often the CCO role is weakly defined and unempowered, which curtails his ability to make a real difference.

Richard Vancil, vice president of the executive advisory group at IDC, likens the situation to the time when chief marketing officer was first coined in the late 1990s. "There were lots of companies looking to put someone in that great-sounding post," Vancil says, "but they didn't really give them much of a voice at the table. As a result, you saw [executive search firm] Spencer Stuart reporting that the average CMO tenure was 24 months. For CMOs to thrive and be truly effective, they need to be in place for longer than 24 months-they need four or even five years."

The same is true for Chief Customer Officers if the  position is to truly become a major player at the corporate table.

"It's up to the candidate to prove the value of the position's very existence," says SPSS's Shearer. "They need to bite off projects to show their genuine value in bringing in customers, and to take very visible steps to improve customer retention, advocacy rates, return on investment, and so on."

"The role sounds heavy-duty," adds Vancil, "but if you're not bringing revenue to the company, or are 'just' a staff person, you may not have a lot of credibility at the table. There will be fewer of these senior staffers hired in the near term, and more emphasis on where revenue-generating possibilities are hopping."

Overcoming competing voices is also essential. "Whether it's a CMO or a CCO, your voice can be drowned out by, primarily, the engineering group, which is always talking about the next product, and by the sales execs, who may say they're the proxy for what the customer wants, but usually that's true only for the next week or next month. You need to be looking ahead to the next year," Vancil says. "There should be more of a chief customer strategist voice there as well, who can say, 'Here's what our customers want and need six, 12, 18 months from now. We should be building to what the customers really want."

"Finding someone who is really a champion of the customer, who has a unified view of the customer-that's what's important," Shearer adds. It's no longer just about a product or a transaction. Even if the economy wasn't in the state it's in, this whole idea of organizations treating their customers holistically has very much been gaining traction."