According to a recent report, CMOs (or chief marketing officers) “don’t know how to use customer input to improve operations, products and processes”.

According to a survey run by the CMO Council, a staggering 59% of CMOs interviewed said their companies “do not compensate any employees or executives based on customer loyalty, satisfaction improvements or analytics”. Only just over a third said that they gathered customer insights from customer engagement opportunities; and only 15% use this information to “identify and cultivate” potentially powerful brand ambassadors.

Some more unnerving stats include:

• 33% indicated their companies “claim to be good at handling customer complaints”.
• 23% indicated their companies “track or measure customer emails”.
• 17% use email feedback “to identify potential customer advocates”.
• 16% “monitor online message boards and social networking sites”.
• Only 33% said that they used customer problems as a means to cultivate new sales opportunities with their customers.
• Only 16% used customer interactions as a means of introducing new products or services.

The study, “Giving Customer Voice More Volume”, published on Mediapost and discussed on the MarketingProf’s Daily Fix Blog,  was based on a survey with about 500 senior marketer respondents from major corporations.

According to the executive director of the CMO Council, Donovan Neale-May, the “customer custodian function is the most critical role a CMO can play in an organisation: To own every facet of listening, learning, interacting, engaging and optimising the relationship with the customer, and understanding where the attrition, pain and aggravation is, and doing this in real time. It is mind-boggling to me that the level of attention to this is not what it should be, and is fragmented in terms of who owns it.”

Ted Mininni, writing on MarketingProfs’ Daily Fix Blog questions: “Shouldn’t listening and engaging customers be job #1 for everyone in every company right now?”

“It seems to me, if there’s one thing companies can and should do right now to stabilise their sales losses, it ought to involve customer retention initiatives first rather than customer acquisition as the primary goal,” he says.