Diana Bell is the first vice president of total customer experience for HP – a position created in the wake of the company’s takeover of Compaq Corp. She says that, while HP historically has communicated with customers on a continuing basis through customer-advisory councils and user groups, “all of that was still happening in vertical silos” organized around particular kinds of products.

“My role is being looked at as a horizontal role, so I report through worldwide operations,” says the 27-year veteran with the California-based technology concern. “Customers choose us for a reason, and I have to make sure that we deliver on that brand promise and measure ourselves accordingly.”

Among the tools Bell is using in her job is what she calls a “balance score card,” which reflects how well HP is doing in keeping its “brand promise” as perceived by the customer and HP employees. Delivering the brand promise has been a primary concern of HP management about the merger. “What I’m really doing is making sure that the structure and the system works, so that it can’t be that one rep owns a customer and no one else has to worry about it,” she says. “I have to make sure that everyone is doing what they need to do on behalf of our customers.”

Public-relations firm Golin Harris International created its Chief Client Officer position in January and filled it with Fred Cook, who had been managing the western US for the Illinois-based company. As CCO, he’s focusing on the agency’s largest clients – including Toyota, Nintendo, Lowes and Sprint – which involves interaction in several cities and across more than one practice area.

“I make sure they’re getting the highest level of client service from our resources, and also develop new client-service products that will help us better serve them and better understand where their business is headed; and I evaluate and measure our results,” Cook says. His new job not only is a recognition of the increasingly complex needs that can be presented by a single important client but also “of how important our current clients are in this type of an economic environment,” he says.

Jeff Lewis had been working with Massachusetts-based Monster.com as a consultant for six months before joining the company last year as CCO. Among other strategies, he has constructed a system by which the company will be measuring its performance with customers each quarter. The system is based on criteria such as whether Monster.com is adding customers and how loyal those customers are. To determine the latter, Lewis finds out whether customers “are behaving in any way that we can interpret as loyal, such as referring other people to us, buying other products with us, just trusting us to do more than one thing well.”

Lewis also is redesigning the company’s customer-relations unit “so that we can deliver the right levels of service to customers.” For example, he already has figured out that customers weren’t satisfied with Monster.com’s standard of delivering an online set up within a business day. “It was inconsistent with most customers’ requirements: Either they wanted to be set up immediately, like within two hours, or it was OK to do it within a couple of days,” he says. “We had been doing it exactly wrong.”

Of course, the creation of a CCO position alone doesn’t signify that companies truly are more effectively focusing on their customers. “The big issue is changing the culture of an organization and business processes, so it needs to be something the whole organization embraces,” says Charles Chung, vice president of information intelligence for Experian Information Solutions Inc., a California-based consulting firm. “It helps to have a CCO, but how he or she executes a strategy makes the difference.”

Dale Buss is a journalist and editorial consultant in Rochester Hills, Michigan. He's a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and a former contributing editor of Brand Marketing.