As customer reference programs evolve, mature and move up the chain within organizations, so does the career path of reference professionals. Many of you started on the journey by quickly filling needs to contact customers and create customer stories. Then, perhaps you needed more hands to help you and, thus, became a manager. As the value of references soaked into your company's culture, more reference managers may have sprouted all over the company-you may have been promoted to a manager's manager; a director of the company-wide reference program. But does the path end there?

Over time, it has become evident that the reference program is a treasure-trove of unique customer contacts; it's a fount of knowledge and intelligence that quenches the thirst of customer-hungry groups and organizations. What used to be about managing activities and recruiting customers is now about capturing and highlighting valuable customer intelligence and partnering with customers to provide joint value. But that's not the end of the path, either.

The next stop along the CRP career path is in a role that manages how customer information bubbles up and how it influences the company. It's in a new office we see on the horizon called the Office of the Customer. The leader of this new office is Chief Customer Officer. As Chief Customer Officer, you will no longer focus on transactional interactions that typically haunt the perception of many reference programs. Instead, you will focus on threading the voice of your company's customers throughout the organization-and specifically and especially in corporate strategy.

Executives are getting it: paramount to retaining valuable and profitable customers is the need to understand them, their buying decisions and why they selected your company. And they're also starting to get this: that loyalty and willingness to refer are as important as you've been saying all along. And who better to manage that most-important function? Who's been there all along cheering and rooting for customers? Who knows just how strategically important the customer is to your company? It's you-the reference professional!