Jeanne Bliss

Jeanne Bliss held the chief customer officer role five times over more than twenty years, at Lands' End, Allstate, Coldwell Banker, Mazda and Microsoft. She was doing the job before it had a settled name, and much of what the role now involves was defined in the course of her holding it.

In 2002 she founded CustomerBliss, the customer experience practice she has led since, working with organizations including AAA, Johnson and Johnson, Brooks Brothers, Costco and Kaiser Permanente. She is a co-founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association, the body that has since done much to professionalise the field.

Her books are the reference texts for the structural side of this work: Chief Customer Officer, Chief Customer Officer 2.0, I Love You More Than My Dog, and Would You Do That To Your Mother?. The last of those supplies her most quoted test, which asks whether a policy would survive being applied to someone you love, and which turns out to identify bad practice faster than most customer research does.

What separates her material from general customer experience content is the focus on governance. She addresses who owns the customer, which metrics leadership is actually held to, and how a company organises itself so improvements survive a reorganisation. That is the part of the discipline where most programmes fail, and it is a leadership question rather than a service one.

She is booked by organizations standing up a customer experience function, by leadership teams whose satisfaction scores have stopped responding to effort, and by conferences where the audience is the people accountable for the number rather than the people delivering the service.