In The Rise Of The Chief Customer Officer, Paul Hagen of Forrester begins,

Over the past five years Forrester Research has observed an increase in the number of companies with a single executive leading customer experience efforts across a business unit or an entire company. These individuals often serve as top executives, with the mandate and power to design, orchestrate and improve customer experiences across every customer interaction. And whether firms call them Chief Customer Officers (CCOs) or give them some other label, these leaders sit at high levels of power at companies as diverse as Allstate, Dunkin’ Brands, Oracle and USAA.

Other titles meaning roughly the same thing are Chief Client Officer and Chief Experience Officer. All, Paul writes, “are charged with improving the customer experience.”

From the VRM perspective, that’s all we need to know. We’re the customers, and we’re charged with improving our experience too.

So I dug around a bit, and came up with a few leads and links that I’ll post here as a shout-out to the folks and disciplines involved.

First is the Chief Customer Officer Council, founded and led by Curtis Bingham (whom I see by LinkedIn is, like me, in the Boston area). Next are (via the CCOC),

• Jasmine Green, VP and Chief Customer Advocate for Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, who won CCO of the Year.
• Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace. I’ve been tight with Rackspace ever since Dirk Elmendorf and Richard Yoo started the company when they were college students in San Antonio. I met both when Linux Journal was one of their first customers. (Both are now married to women who worked at the magazine, and Searls.com is still hosted there.)
• Dennison DeGregor, Worldwide CRM Executive at Hewlett-Packard.
• Patty VanLammeren, Senior Vice President Agency Sales and Regional Marketing at Allstate Insurance. Before that she was Chief Customer Experience Officer at the company.
• Jay Topper, Senior Vice President, Customer Success, at Rosetta Stone.
• Victoria Stennes, VP In-flight experience, JetBlue Airways

These are people VRM-equipped customers are going to meet in the new middle. This small post is toward making the acquaintance.