Does Your Company Need a Chief Customer Officer? With Rod Cherkas, Author of The CCO Playbook

In the Membership Economy, customer-centricity is critical in building lasting relationships and optimizing lifetime value. As a result, the Chief Customer Officer, or CCO, is increasingly present at the leadership table. Today’s guest, Rod Cherkas, founder of HelloCCO, literally wrote the book on the CCO role. It’s called The Chief Customer Officer Playbook: 8 Strategies that will Accelerate your Career and Win you a Seat at the Executive Table and it just came out in Spring of 2023. The book is based on Rod’s own experience as a Post-Sale leader at companies including Intuit, RingCentral, Marketo and Gainsight. In today’s conversation, we talk about key metrics for customer success, the changing role of CCO, and what most companies get wrong when trying to build forever transactions with their customers.

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Does Your Company Need a Chief Customer Officer? With Rod Cherkas, Author of The CCO Playbook

In the membership economy, customer centricity is critical in building lasting relationships and optimizing lifetime value. As a result, the Chief Customer Officer or CCO is increasingly present at the leadership table. Our guest, Rod Cherkas, Founder of HelloCCO, wrote the book on the CCO role. It’s called The Chief Customer Officer Playbook, 8 Strategies That Will Accelerate Your Career and Win You a Seat at the Executive Table. It came out in the spring of 2023. It’s based on Rod’s own experience as a post-sale leader at companies including Intuit, RingCentral, Marketo, and Gainsight. In this conversation, we talk about key metrics for customer success, the changing role of the CCO, and what most companies get wrong when trying to build forever transactions with their customers.

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Rod, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Robbie. It’s good to see you and good to talk to you.

It’s always good to spend time with you. Let’s start at the beginning. What is a CCO? Where are they appropriate? What are their responsibilities? Can you educate the audience a little bit about the chief customer officer?

A chief customer officer is an executive at many companies that is responsible for the customer-facing experiences at that company for pulling them together. Increasingly, they’re responsible for a broad number of functional organizations that are responsible for delivering those experiences. Those might include a support organization or a customer education organization that provides training. It may include a team that works with your customers to help them get set up and onboarded with your solution, a product, or a service.

There’s often a team that works with your existing clients to help them see value from your product or service. Sometimes it’s called a customer success management organization or an account management organization. All of these teams come together ideally to create a seamless experience that helps customers to see value and helps create that strong relationship so that they stay a customer and potentially buy other products and services from you.

This sounds like something that could be relevant in a lot of different kinds of organizations. I think it got its start, and correct me if I’m wrong, on the more technical B2B side, but where is it most valuable? Are there places where other organizations don’t need a chief customer officer?

The chief customer officer role started years ago and it was part of organizations, whether it was technology companies, retail companies, or other business services types of companies. That initial role was often to gather feedback, the voice of customers from various listening posts, assemble it, interpret it, and then try to influence organizations based on what your customers were saying. This first generation of chief customer officers didn’t necessarily have the operating teams to affect those outcomes.

They were basically getting this feedback and then trying to influence a product team to create a product in a different way or their solution and then working with a sales organization or influencing how the marketing team described the solution to better set expectations. What’s happened over the past few years is this role of chief customer officer now has operating teams, and in some cases, very large organizations, that are responsible for the delivery of these experiences and outcomes to their customers. The chief customer officer role has become a much more central and important part of an executive team and they have particular operating metrics that they’re responsible for. They increasingly contribute to revenue and profitability growth at a company.

You had me reflecting on the first time that I heard someone use the phrase customer success. I was working at an organization a few years ago that had a Software as a Service product, which is effectively a subscription. They were noticing that people were buying the product and not using it and then canceling at the end of 2, 1, or 3 years, whatever their periods were. They said, “We need customer success.” They had seen it in other organizations and they brought in a 23-year-old good inside sales rep to run it. It was interesting to me. At that time, I remember I was a consultant, and he asked me, “Go work with her and help her do all the things you described.”

Clearly, she’s not the profile of somebody who would be running a large organization, having the ear of the CEO, or interactions with the board, but I think people were realizing that all value was going through her. She was completely, in my opinion, unequipped to deal with it. It was not her fault. She had never led a team, been an executive, built a product, or been part of a product team. I do think there’s something about a service or subscription that especially lends itself well to customer success, which I know is one component and also customer centricity more generally. Have you seen that or do you think that this role and this mindset can work in any kind of organization?

 

The role of a chief customer officer and this ability to be customer-centric works in almost any organization. It’s because, in most cases, your customers are making a decision whether they want to stay with you and your service or they want to move to a competitor. I had worked for a long time. We first met when I worked at Intuit and one of the products I was responsible for was our payroll service. We competed with ADP and with people writing checks on Fridays to pay their employees. What we realized was that you could create a payroll service that had great touchpoints when somebody signed up for the service.

The role of a chief customer officer and this ability to be customer-centric work in almost any organization. It’s because your customers are making a decision about whether they want to stay with you and your service or move to a… Share on X

How did you work with them to make it easy to transition from writing paychecks by hand or with an accountant to doing it yourself when you wanted to do your quarterly forms or at the end of the year? These were add-on services so it could expand relationships. It became easy and you wanted to make sure that you had a team, what we would now call a customer success team, that was making sure that they were using it. They’re paying their employees on a weekly basis. They were getting value from it and they understood that there were maybe more solutions or benefits you could provide these quarterly filings or end-of-your-tax summaries that weren’t necessarily part of your base solution.

Industries across all segments have these same challenges of demonstrating value to their customers. I think this is why the concept of helping make your customers successful has been so important for subscription businesses, not just in the technology industry, but in basically any type of product or service where your customer is making a decision, “Do I want to work with you again or is there an alternative that provides better value?”

Industries have the same challenges in demonstrating value to customers. This is why the concept of helping your customers succeed is important for subscription businesses, not just in the tech industry but in any type of product or… Share on X

Any business where your customer has a choice and where the need is ongoing can benefit from having a little more customer-centricity and perhaps a customer-centric leader on the executive team. If you’re last gas for 100 miles or you have the patent for the drug that keeps people alive, they don’t have any choices. You don’t have to be that nice to them or understand them. Although, I would say even in those cases, what I’ve come to believe is if you’re last gas for 100 miles and your bathroom is dirty, someone is going to put a gas station right next to you with a clean bathroom. Even if you don’t have competitors, it’s probably worth thinking about all those touchpoints.

Also, the other thing that you bring up that’s important for people to grasp is that it’s important to think about the touchpoints after the moment of the transaction. A lot of organizations are very focused on the touchpoints leading up to the money exchanging hands, and then they forget that person or that customer, and go back out into the wider pool and try to find another customer. Rather than saying, “We have this customer that you brought up onboarding. You brought up touchpoints on their journey and expanded the relationship.” Maybe they didn’t know that Intuit has all these additional features that are even included. Getting the value you’re already paying for can be a very powerful way to keep people and also inspire them to trust you to go even deeper.

I believe that is a different role fundamentally than a sales organization, which was one of the key differentiators because sales is good at understanding unmet needs and driving a transaction. A lot of times, there’s not always an obvious next product or service to purchase. Sales teams are often incentivized to spend time and invest only when there are these growth opportunities. Somebody needs to be responsible for making sure that customer is seeing value in the things that they’re getting so that there are these opportunities for growth later on.

I wanted to share a story about my own experience. My first job was working at my mother’s dry cleaners. You’d be thinking to yourself, “What does dry cleaners have to do with a subscription service?” I would argue that somebody who’s working and maybe is wearing five shirts a week and coming in to get them cleaned, or their dresses every week, is fundamentally a recurring revenue business.

As a teenager, I would work at my mom’s store and make a game out of trying to remember everybody’s name when they came in so that I would greet them by name and they would perhaps have a differentiated experience. They would appreciate the fact that I asked them about themselves. If you remember, it goes around a little cycle. I would be able to pick their name out of our tag holder and start getting their clothes even before they got to the counter. They appreciated that.

That was my first experience in understanding the value of making those connections with customers so that people would look forward to bringing their clothes in and getting them cleaned. It creates that little differentiation of a fairly commodity type of business. I would imagine there are a lot of companies out there where, in that recurring revenue business or whether you have repeat interactions with your customers, those nice little experiences make a big difference for your customers and that you’ll be able to keep them over time.

I love that story, especially because I know there are a lot of people tuning in who are starting small businesses, running small businesses, or running businesses where it’s not officially a subscription business, but it is what I call part of the membership economy where somebody feels they belong. I imagine that many people might have started going to your mom’s dry cleaners because it was conveniently located or the prices were low, fair, or whatever. The acquisition benefits are location and price. The retention benefit was you. It’s fun to see her son and it’s faster and friendlier. It changes it from being a chore to being a visit and all of that, even changing your mindset.

You and I are both in Silicon Valley. We both work with a lot of tech companies. It’s not always about the product. Sometimes, you have this great opportunity. Often, it’s even less expensive to think about the entire customer journey and customers like, “Where does this fit?” Your example of, “If I pick up my dry cleaning, that might be the thing I do between the time I eat breakfast and leave for work and the time I get to work. How do I make that as easy, positive, and fast as possible?” There’s so much more to it than we’re in the business of clean clothes. People often don’t care. I don’t know if this is true.

Maybe I’m taking this too far, but I, as a dry cleaning customer, don’t understand when the dry cleaners tell me that they’ve changed their process and it’s better, 8% cleaner, or whatever. I do recognize when there’s a parking spot out front, they have my stuff ready before I get there, they’ve taken extra attention to details, or they remember my daughter’s name. All of that contributes to how I make this task easier and more enjoyable.

I wrote a book called The Chief Customer Officer Playbook, which is an opportunity for all in one place. It defines the role of a chief customer officer, the key responsibilities, and, importantly, the skills and expectations from my work with clients. My experience of many years working at recurring revenue companies was important for leaders and business owners to develop. I think the principles and strategies that I talked about in the book are applicable across industries. One of the themes that I discuss is the importance of being thoughtful about what your differentiators are and you, as an individual leader, the culture that you create for your organization around focusing on customers and creating these differentiators.

Many times, your customers don’t understand why your product is physically different from another or it feels like a commodity. What’s different to them is how they feel about using your product or service or how easy it is to do business with you. In the book, I talk about a number of stories and examples of how I or dozens of leaders and managers that I interview, I know that the stories they tell around building that experience into the work that they do.

You get extra credit points for anticipating my next question, which was about The Chief Customer Officer Playbook. I’m amazed that it’s taken this long for this book to come out. Honestly, it’s important. You, having been in recurring revenue businesses for such a long time, having experiences with a variety of businesses, and in some cases, working with what I think of as a meta customer. Being the customer success leader and the chief customer officer at a company that supports that function makes you uniquely qualified to write this book.

The book is divided into three parts. The role of the CCO, the path to becoming the CCO, and then how to get their action plan and then trends. Let’s talk about each one. We’ve talked somewhat about the role of the chief customer officer. Is there anything else that we didn’t get to when you think of that role and how your understanding of that role has evolved since you were that kid in the dry cleaners?

I would add two things to what I talked about earlier. One is the importance that the chief customer officer plays in bringing the point of view of the customer back into the decisions made by the executive team. There’s no one else who’s solely responsible for that. What that means is bringing the insights and trends that you’re hearing in the market from all of the teams that you’re working with. Understanding what their unmet needs are that you might be hearing from your support, your implementation, your account management team, and importantly, prioritizing that and being their advocate in those decisions.

The second part is that, particularly given where we are in the economy now, the chief customer officer role has an increasingly commercial impact on the revenues and profitability of a company. That’s a little bit of a change. I would say even a couple of years ago, their key metrics might have been net promoter score or what percentage of your customers felt green or good about the product. You might rate them as green, yellow, or red in some systems or on a spreadsheet. Now, your board, investors, and CEO expect you to be contributing directly to revenue growth through increased retention and expansion into other products and services. I would add that as a dimension of the key responsibilities of a chief customer officer.

To summarize, it’s the voice of the customer, particularly in the active experience of the customer post-sale as opposed to market research, which I know we’ll talk about in a moment. Also, the increased financial responsibility and recognition that you’re in a role that is not overhead. Customer support used to be seen as an expense, as part of overhead, or as a cost center. As opposed to nowadays, the chief customer officer’s domain, which includes maybe what was formerly known as customer support and now customer success, is about retention, expansion, referrals, and building that flywheel for growth and much more profitable revenue.

There still is a function called customer support or product support that, for the most part, is reactive. Customers have an issue and you try to resolve their question. This mindset of customer success, I would say, is different because it is driving the best chief customer officers. They use it to help drive revenue growth. That’s where companies get attention and allocate their resources. If you’re seen as a, “We have an issue, and let’s resolve it,” that still needs to happen. The more that this CCO role can affect top-line revenue growth and bottom-line profitability, the more respect and resources they get.

That’s the first part of the book, The Role Of The CCO. The next part is about how you get there, The Path. I mentioned this young woman who came out of inside sales. Is that the best place to start? What is the path to get there if that is both in terms of, “I someday want to be Rod and run this function in organizations?” Also, “If I work in an organization that doesn’t value customer-centricity in this way, what’s the path for me to bring along my leadership team or my colleagues?”

Let me start with the path. If your company is customer-centric and where this is an important value, how might that work? I would argue that there are a lot of career paths how to become a customer-facing executive and ultimately being a chief customer officer. One thing that’s often common is that individuals like working with customers and that is not obvious. There are so many people I work with that want to make it transactional and don’t understand customers aren’t particularly empathetic with them. They’re not trying to remember their name or something about them. It’s like, “We’re done,” or they are sitting at their desk, or they are working on a spreadsheet. There are lots of people like that.

Working with customers can be fun and rewarding when things are going well. You also have to have a bit of thick skin because in customer-facing businesses, there are always opportunities to improve. There are some unique characteristics of individuals who make good customer-facing leaders. In the book, The Chief Customer Officer Playbook, I outline what I call the CCO Maturity Model, which is a set of eight skills and strategies that I believe from my work with clients and from my research is critical for evolving leaders to develop. Those types of skills can be applied at any level of an organization. Whether you’re a manager, a director, a VP, or a chief customer officer, they potentially have a bigger impact.

One example of that is the ability to communicate and tell stories. A customer-facing leader at a director level should be able to communicate to their organization maybe at all hands, maybe at a small customer event, about the themes, industry trends, and best practices. As you become a vice president, you should be able to do it at your company all hands and at a breakout session at your customer event or at your annual company meeting to get on stage. At a chief customer officer level, you might be able to do that to your board of directors. You might be a keynote speaker at your company event. You might be asked to speak at industry conferences.

What I outline in the book are the set of skills that create the foundation for being a customer-facing executive and the types of activities that you can be doing to build those skills wherever you are in an organization. I find it less important that you are in one function. It’s probably better to have worked across different functions, in a support organization, in an education team, in a success management team, or with new customers to help them get started because you start to understand all of those experiences and how they come together.

The takeaway I’m getting is it’s more about your proclivities and your skills than it is about what roles you’ve had in the past. Some of the stuff can’t be taught. Some of it can, but some of it is, “What gets you excited? What gets you out of bed in the morning?” It’s a personality, but there are some very specific skills that will drive success, like storytelling and empathy. Also, understanding of your company’s products and how they sell. That’s the path and then the last thing you talk about is you have an action plan and trends. Why did you end with that?

One of the skills of being a chief customer officer and an aspiring customer-facing leader is being able to anticipate the future and bring those insights and best practices back to your customers. You talked earlier about companies that aren’t customer-centric. A lot of it is reactive. A big transition for companies is to go from being reactive to proactive. What I try to do in these insights and trends at the end of the book is to give people ideas on where to be thinking about in their careers. Also, what types of things are happening externally so that as they talk to peers and identify best practices that people are doing, they can bring it back to their own companies.

An example of a trend that I think will be increasingly important is what’s happening around artificial intelligence and machine learning. This goes to where we’re in the economy. A lot of companies are trying to increase automation, self-service, and operational efficiency because they don’t have the same resources that they may have had over the past couple of years.

The ability to make these self-service resources more automated is very important. We’ve seen it around the introduction of ChatGPT and giving examples of how you might be able to ask questions and get answers. It could be used around support organizations and how people learn to use your solution. I’d encourage the audience here to try it out. Go to the website and ask a question that your new customers might ask or go and ask a question that your customers might have in support. You’ll be shocked.

At how good the answers are?

I was shocked. I published my book and I went and asked the chatbot to give a 200-word summary of The Chief Customer Officer Playbook by Rod Cherkas. It wrote a shockingly good overview. First, I don’t know how it got the information behind it, but it was quite relevant. I did a couple of things like that. It could be one area that helps you improve your experiences for your customers without having to add resources. The second trend, and I’ll give an example, is that customer-facing executives will have an increasing impact on their company’s financials.

That will become a more important part of how their success is measured that hasn’t necessarily been over the past couple of years. The ability to connect the dots between what your team is doing and revenue outcomes or profitability outcomes, and whatever business you’re in, whether you’re in healthcare, technology, financial services, or retail, being able to demonstrate the impact of what you’re doing is critical.

You worded that, if I remember right, as increased accountability for revenue and profitability, which is interesting because that’s a little bit of a double-edged sword. It’s great that you’re part of the financial recognition. What you’re doing is important and you probably get bigger budgets and more responsibility. Also, it moves from being a softer thing to being something where people are going to care about the metrics you’re driving.

That accountability means that your executive team and your board can count on you for certain results. One of the methodologies I’ve been talking about is the concept of a CCOdometer.

Is that a new metric or a new dashboard?

That’s my new gauge. It’s a gauge of how well your CFO and your CEO believe that you can deliver repeatable, reliable results. Anybody in a recurring revenue business is expected to create those predictable outcomes. That’s what your company is looking for. A lot of times, you’re on the left side of that CCOdometer where you’re uncertain about whether you’re going to get those outcomes or maybe you’re at a stage of optimism where you want to get to a stage of reliability.

I talk about, not in the book, but around the book, getting to that place where you can be a reliable contributor to those outcomes. I believe that being accountable and taking a stand and say, “I’m going to hit that number, whether that number is a retention rate, a growth rate, or a profitability metric,” is important and not just saying, “I’m going to improve customer experience.” That’s very hard to do. How do you improve customer experience in a way that affects your company’s financial outcomes?

I believe that being accountable and taking a stand and saying, “I'm going to hit that number, whether that number is a retention or growth rate or a profitability metric,” is important and not just saying, “I'm going to improve customer… Share on X

I know one of the most popular metrics that’s often associated with the chief customer officer is the net promoter system score. We talked about the fact that we both know Stu Berman, who’s involved in the Net Promoter System Loyalty Forum at Bain, and was an earlier guest on the show. What are your thoughts on how NPS has evolved and where it fits on the odometer or the dashboard? What is its role now? What are you seeing out on the horizon?

The Net Promoter Survey score is one of the metrics that customer-facing leaders measure. It’s a general gauge of how the company is doing. I believe that, going back to this trend that I’ve seen in my clients to focus on the financial outcomes, those customer-facing teams are increasingly focused on a metric called either Net Retention Rate, which is how much of your revenue you are retaining year to year, and also how much you’re growing from that base. Another metric is called Gross Retention, which is basically of 100% percent that you have a period of time how much you are retaining. There’s a Cost of Delivery metric, which is another key metric. NPS is one of those but it isn’t necessarily the desired outcome.

 

As companies need to differentiate their experience and focus on certain segments of customers, the goal isn’t always to make every customer optimally happy because there’s a trade-off that you need to make. If you’re overinvesting in one area, you may not have the ability to invest in a different segment. In this environment or this economy where teams are having to make trade-offs, you’re not necessarily trying to do the best thing and make every customer happy. You’re trying to be conscious about where you invest your resources. It’s something that companies still measure and it’s important, particularly the qualitative feedback, but not always by itself.

As companies need to differentiate their experience and focus on certain segments of customers, the goal isn't always to make everyone optimally happy. There's a trade-off you need to make. If you're overinvesting in an area, you may not… Share on X

You are shining a light on the importance of having a dashboard and not one metric. Many companies want to have one metric that the whole company can get behind. I believe that sometimes it works for a season to say, “This is the season that we’re going to focus on this one metric because we’ve all been underinvesting in it.” In the long-term, it’s about balance. These are leading indicators or helpful indicators, but they’re not the most important. Income is about the ultimate outcome.

The other thing that makes me think of as such a good example of the potential issue looking at NPS is the old folklore tail about Nordstrom. It’s how they used to say that you could return anything. It’s how you could return a car tire, they would take it and give you money even though they don’t even sell tires and nobody would ever think that they would sell tires. That’s a perfect example also of why you should do it. That customer is probably very delighted with Nordstrom. They got $87 for their tire or whatever.

I work with a lot of clients who are thinking about this segmentation strategy. How do they provide differentiated experiences to different groups of customers? Those customers are all often thinking about different groups of competitors.

A quick clarifying. It could be, “This is how we serve our pharma customers and retail customers,” but it could also be, “This is how we serve our top ten largest, most engaged customers versus how we serve the 5,000 tiny customers.”

I work with a healthcare client, for example, and their experience serving their top 30 hospital chains and health networks is very different from how they service one-unit regional hospital or medical clinics in what they do. It’s not even a technology solution. It’s the value they’re providing or the insights and attention they get. A lot of times, your smaller companies don’t want the same attention that your larger companies get. They don’t necessarily want to hear from you every week. They don’t want to meet all the time because the person you’re working with has multiple jobs. Understanding your cost of delivery and being thoughtful about what value is important, and what outcomes are important in each segment is an important factor for a lot of folks that are likely tuning in.

We’ve covered a lot of things. We could obviously talk about for a lot longer, but I want to wrap up with a speed round. Does that sound okay to you? Maybe even fun.

I would love that. Let’s do it.

The first subscription you ever had?

The New York Times in college and I’ve had it since then.

Your favorite subscription right now?

Right now, LinkedIn Sales Navigator. With the release of my book, it’s been interesting to see who’s signing up, who’s buying my book, and how to communicate with them. That’s top of mind these days.

Since we’re talking about LinkedIn, besides you and me, one person on LinkedIn that care about customer success and customer centricity should be following?

I would say Rob Dhaliwal. He’s an investor. He’s had some interesting observations about what he’s seeing in his portfolio companies, which are both technology companies and non-technology companies, how the perspective among board members is changing about what they need from customer-facing leaders. I’ve talked some of these about the importance of having a commercial focus on revenue and profitability and the ability to tie the work that you’re doing to the outcomes of your company.

Best or worst customer experience you’ve had?

The worst is with an insurance company that keeps canceling my autopay. Every single quarter, we get a letter saying that we’ve missed our payment and then we have to call. It turns out that they send out the letter before the bill date. There’s no way to probably understand that. Anyway, it’s one of the ways that they can improve.

Best cake you ever received for writing a book?

From Katie’s Creative Cakes in San Mateo, California. My wife and family made a cake in the style of the chief customer officer. It was awesome. It had a little picture of me at the top made of frosting. They’ve been calling it Frosting Rod.

You’re not a success until you have a likeness in frosting.

Outstanding and such a sweet guy.

Best advice for someone writing a book?

Many people have insight that is valuable to share to start writing things and sharing your thought leadership with others. When you have a point of view that you think you can organize into a book, start doing that. The other advice I would have is to hire somebody who has either written a book before or whose business is helping people write books. Not a ghostwriter, but someone that can hold you accountable. That was a very useful resource.

 

I worked with a guy named Dan Janal, who’s what’s called a Developmental Editor. I met with him once a week for about 15 or 16 weeks. I owed him my chapter every week, and we worked through it and that was great. He didn’t know my subject matter expertise, but he was a guide in helping to write an effective book.

Dan is a great guy and a great writer. Having a developmental editor is something that I also had in writing my books. I started without one because I have a big ego, but then, I had my humbling moment and hired a developmental editor to keep me accountable and also to help me shape both the membership economy and the forever transaction. That’s very good advice. Rod Cherkas, thank you so much for being a guest on the show. It was a real pleasure to talk to you.

Thank you, Robbie. It was great to talk to you.

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That was customer success expert, Rod Cherkas, who led post-sales functions at companies including Intuit, RingCentral, Marketo, and Gainsight. For more about Rod and his new book, The Chief Customer Officer Playbook, go to HelloCCO.com. If you like the show, please go to Apple iTunes and leave a review. Mention Rod and this episode if you especially enjoyed it. Reviews are how our audience find our show, and we appreciate each one. Thank you for your support. Thanks for tuning in.

 

Important Links

• Rod Cherkas, Founder of HelloCCO
• HelloCCO
• Get Your Copy of The Chief Customer Officer Playbook, 8 Strategies That Will Accelerate Your Career and Win You a Seat at the Executive Table
• Subscription Stories Episode 10: Bain’s Stuart Berman on the Power of The NPS Loyalty Forum in Deepening Client Relationships Between Engagements
• Dan Janal, Developmental Editor

 

About Rod Cherkas

Rod Cherkas is the CEO of HelloCCO and is a well-respected consultant and advisor to Chief Customer Officers and their Post-Sale leaders. He has been a post-sale executive at several of Silicon Valley’s most customer-centric companies including Intuit, RingCentral, Marketo and Gainsight. He is also the author of the best-selling book The Chief Customer Officer Playbook: 8 Strategies that will Accelerate your Career and Win you a Seat at the Executive Table. The book was released on February 1, 2023 and is available on Amazon.

 

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