The CMO should oversee all marketing, PR, communications, customer service, and customer experience management. Every touch point with the consumer needs to come under her purview. Often this is not the case—customer service and communications are often siloed. This is a big mistake in the new marketing/social world.
The CIO manages the implementation of useful technology that increases information accessibility and ensures integrated systems management. The successful CIO needs an intimate idea of how current technology can increase the company’s sales and not just reduce costs or improve clerical productivity, and how technology can support marketing, customer service, and the overall customer experience.
Most often, unfortunately, the CMO and CIO make for tense allies, but it is truly allies that they need to be going forward.
My advice is to make absolutely certain that your CMO and CIO have close ties, and learn to not only “play nice,” but to do their best to understand the vital role they play as a team. The kind of communication required to deliver the ultimate customer experience needs to run across and run through both channels. For them to be successful requires an enterprise-wide cultural shift.
My hope is that as the new marketing world matures, building better customer relationships will become everyone’s primary objective, from sales, to marketing, to customer service—even IT departments. If that’s the true objective, then “customer relationships” truly has a chance to be the X factor in achieving Return on Relationship and enhancing ROI for the long term.