Customer expectation in the United States has held steady for the last decade, while customer satisfaction has deteriorated. To reverse this trend, many companies are now strategically leveraging all parts of their organizations to offer customer-centric approaches to increase customer satisfaction. CEOs can potentially serve as important customer service reps in complementary roles to frontline customer service, sales, and customer experience management personnel. But do the potential benefits of the CEO as customer service rep outweigh the potential drawbacks?
Elon Musk thinks so. He often replies to individual Tesla and Twitter customer inquiries, complaints, and requests on Twitter. John Legere, former CEO of T-Mobile, once stepped in to solve a Wi-Fi issue that allowed thousands of people to continue following the details of an in-flight romance unfolding on social media. Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, regularly solicits feedback from airline…
This article was written by G. Tomas M. Hult and originally published on hbr.org