Are we missing a key member of the team?

Firstly, welcome back to a New Year!  Hopefully you had a chance to grab some rest, and have now fully recharged your personal batteries so that you are not suffering from any range anxiety for your journey through 2026…

As usual, I mixed some business and pleasure, catching up on some reading – something that I used to do a lot more of than I find time for now.  I finally got round to reading ‘Broken Alliances’ – Carlos Ghosn’s perspective on his arrest and the disruption to the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance.  I have acted as a consultant to Nissan in the past, and I was reminded again of a senior role that Ghosn created in both Renault and Nissan of the Chief Performance Officer – a cross-functional role that has always puzzled me slightly when viewed either top down or functionally.  If the CEO and the top team are doing their jobs, why do you then need a Chief Performance Officer to look over their shoulders?

I then returned to my dealer business where we are in the process of implementing some AI tools and some new or enhanced processes, primarily focused on better supporting the customer journey and leads management.  If, as ICDP research suggests, most customers have made their brand choice before they visit any dealers, then a prospect who is approaching a dealer is yours to lose as a customer, rather than one who you need to convince is in the right place.  This is borne out in our customer reviews – we tend (fortunately) to score mainly five star reviews from customers who we supported well through the final stages of their buying journey.  But we also get a few one star scores from individuals who we have let down in some way, usually at the early stages of their journey when the team were all busy when the customer visited or we did not return a call or email.  Our IT and process changes are intended to support the team so that we eliminate those failures as much as possible.

I joked with our Marketing Manager that she could end up with the highest headcount in the business, but that none of them would actually exist, they would all be AI agents, and her role would be to supervise them, checking the metrics, ensuring that everything that was running in the background was running as we would like it to run.  We need to learn in order to ensure that the bots are behaving in the way we want and that the actions that end up in the lap of a human are being followed through effectively.  In an AI-enabled world, we aspire to make the business digitally-driven, with smarter, faster decisions, and the humans able to focus their time on providing the person-to-person positive experience that we know is the strongest influence on the customer buying decision.  But in that world, how do we know it’s all working and who is then accountable for this?

That brought me back to thinking about the role of the Chief Performance Officer, and how such a role might apply in much smaller businesses including Auto West London.  Is it sensible that I ask my Marketing Manager, or indeed her colleagues heading up Sales and Aftersales, to be sat in front of a bank of screens like Houston Mission Control looking for any signs that any part of the business – whether digital or physical – is not performing at the highest level.  Is it realistic that I expect my Sales Director who is hugely impressive in building and nurturing customer relationships, to also direct time and energy to monitoring and taking action on a range of system dashboards?  In an ideal world, that might be the answer, but in the real world, to the extent that these superhumans exist, their numbers will be severely limited and their salaries commensurately high.

Anyone who knows me will know that I am not an avid football fan (soccer for my US readers, though the analogy works well for all versions of the game, and probably all other sports as well).  On the radio news driving into work in the morning, it seems that every day, there are stories of another manager or coach who is being blamed for the poor performance of one of the top football teams, and that in due course he is replaced in the hope that his successor will be able to get better results out of the people on the pitch than the incumbent.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but the point is that the coach is arguably the Chief Performance Officer of a football team.  They are not the Manager, nor a player out on the pitch, but they appear to have a strong influence on results. 

So, whether you look to the Renault-Nissan Alliance or the Premier League, it does seem to me that most businesses are missing a key member of the team – their Chief Performance Officer.  They will observe what’s happening on the pitch (in our case both physically and in the digital channels that attract and support customers), and alert those directly involved to how and where they can up their game.