The Unlikely Path: Accounting to the Customer Suite
Adele Coswello’s career path was far from typical: starting at Deloitte, holding CFO roles, and then moving to Chief Customer Officer (CCO) at Mycar (formerly Kmart Tyre & Auto Service). Coswello explained the move felt natural due to a long-standing “obsession with customers”.
The CCO role at Mycar covers every customer touchpoint leading into the store, including marketing, product, business development, online bookings, and the call center. Crucially, the remit returned to her team once the service was complete, covering complaints and Google reviews. This structure, which the teams referred to as the “CX Champs,” was designed to ensure alignment and conversations between all functions responsible for bringing customers in.
However, the transition was not seamless. While the Managing Director was confident in her commercial ability and understanding of the required marketing spend, the new CFO wasn’t so sure. Coswello noted she found securing her budget “as difficult for me as it is for anyone else”, especially when justifying the much larger investment needed for the new brand.
I think tools like Mutinex, although we're very much in the infancy of our journey with Mutinex, are really important and critical to be able to show and I guess just challenge ourselves around the investment we're making, are we making it in the right place?
– Adele Coswello, CCO, Mycar
Influencing Sceptics: The Continental Challenge
The CCO’s biggest influence challenge came from Mycar’s new owners, Continental, a German tire manufacturer. Coswello had to bridge a fundamental difference in corporate philosophy: in manufacturing, cost-cutting often targeted marketing; in retail, declining sales required increasing spend to drive brand awareness.
The rebrand journey, which she admitted was “naive” initially, causing consumer confusion, required bringing in external expertise and ensuring the entire Senior Leadership Team (SLT) believed in the change. This internal alignment was critical, but the external influence on Continental was an ongoing story, one that restarted with the arrival of a new, French MD from Continental, Silvan, who questioned the “huge amount of money” spent on marketing.
Coswello’s strategy for earning buy-in involved:
- Commercial translation: Breaking down marketing spend and showing why they “want more” investment.
- Education on the Australian market: Explaining the competition (tire-only specialists outspending Mycar) and Mycar’s position as a one-stop shop.
- Leveraging agencies: Making the new MD spend time with the agencies so they could also tell the story of the brand journey.
The True Lever: Team Members and Customer-Led KPIs
Coswello identified a key area where customer leaders “got it wrong”: failing to bring the front line on the journey. Since Mycar was a service business, where “everything has to be done in store” or by mobile van, the team members were the ones who delivered the brand personality and experience.
To drive this culture, Mycar set customer-led targets that preceded sales targets. These targets were simple and constantly preached:
- Google Reviews (Target: 5): An expectation that store teams met a certain percentage of customer reviews each month. This focus lifted the national Google rating from roughly 3.2 to 4.8.
- Customer Growth (“Say yes to every customer”): Driving loyalty by taking on all work, even late in the day, because finding a brilliant mechanic resulted in long-term retention.
I think for us it was, the biggest job was really getting our store team members on board because they deliver the experience and then hopefully then entail, you know, drive that loyalty and so we start to continue to see those customers coming to Mycar.
– Adele Coswello, CCO, Mycar
AI and the Productivity Question
When discussing AI adoption, Coswello noted Mycar moved slowly, hindered by a large ERP transformation and the slow adoption rate of its German parent company. Her approach was to push the envelope wherever possible in the CX world, not to reduce spend, but to change the composition of investment.
AI has already helped Mycar:
- Improve efficiency: Automating simple queries (like store hours) in chat.
- Drive SEO/Content: Rapidly creating high-quality content on the website (e.g., about vehicle noises) which previously took months.
- Assess business development opportunities: Quickly scoping new ideas (like “tinting”) to understand the size of the prize, a task that previously required a research house.
However, she stressed that demand for human interaction remained high for the complex general repair work on older vehicles in the automotive aftermarket. This highlighted the core dilemma CCOs faced when presenting productivity gains to the board: are those gains used for savings, or for higher-order impact and relevance by leveraging human staff for complex, high-value customer interactions?
