Let’s face it: The work of making the customer happy rarely tops an IT professional’s to-do list.

Unlike slashing costs, boosting revenue or pushing the envelope on innovation, increasing customer satisfaction simply (and unfortunately) doesn’t fall under the umbrella of buzz-worthy IT undertakings. No wonder then that only 10 percent of this year’s “State of the CIO” survey respondents consider external customer focus to be an executive leadership competency most critical to their role as CIO. Add to that the fact that respondents say they spend a mere 9.4 percent of their time interacting with external business partners and customers and you get—yes—a customer focus gap.

“Many CIOs are a little cavalier about making raising customer satisfaction an explicit goal,” says Harley Manning, vice president and director of Forrester Research’s customer experience group. Rather, he says, objectives such as cost avoidance and innovation are far more likely to receive top billing on a CIO’s project roster. That’s because not only is bolstering customer loyalty a hard sell among corporate bean counters, its (arguably) intangible benefits and its (allegedly) nebulous returns often make it a thankless job. After all, when it comes to customer feedback, CIOs typically hear one of two things: harsh criticism or the sound of one hand clapping.

But despite this history of practical difficulties and emotional disincentives, some of today’s top CIOs are making customer satisfaction a priority—and reaping huge rewards as a result. They’re discovering that focusing on the customer can yield substantial benefits, including (but not limited to) saving money, increasing sales and enhancing productivity—as well as keeping the customer satisfied.

In fact, by tackling customer-centric IT projects, CIOs can reshape their role as key corporate players and position themselves for greater enterprise responsibility by aligning with the major concern of their executive peers and bosses. Business, after all, is all about serving the customer. If you want to be part of the business (and you do, don’t you?), you want to be a part of that.

Customer Focus Means Organizational Change

Pat Lawicki lights up when discussing her customer-centric IT initiatives. As CIO of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a $12.5 billion San Francisco-based utility, Lawicki serves15 million customers scattered across two-thirds of California. Among them are Silicon Valley behemoths such as Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Cisco. So when the California energy crisis, the Enron debacle and an executive staff overhaul in 2005 threatened to permanently tarnish PG&E’s reputation with its customers, Lawicki began working on a series of customer-focused projects.