5 essentials for a CX leader to succeed in 2024

Today’s world desperately needs more and better leaders, especially with the ever-changing dynamics for the landscape of Customer Experience (CX). To be able to make that mark in CX as a successful leader, you will need to cut off the noise and focus on the fundamentals, first.

I took a step back, before I could even look at what are the leadership must haves to drive a customer centric culture, so I referred to some great material available on the internet, around leadership and leadership styles. I found the Harvard Business Review definition of leadership to be quite comprehensive-

“Achieving significant positive impact- by building an organization of people working together towards a common goal.”

If you aspire to drive leadership to achieve the end results of a customer centric culture & keep customer focus intact, what are the skill sets & knowledge do you need for 2024 and beyond?

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I make an attempt to answer that in today’s article, well aware that any form of leadership is a science & an art, that can be taught as well as mastered with time-

1. Creating a vision full of synergy: By setting up broad goals & supplementing this with the overall organization’s mission to exist, CX leaders can achieve significant impact through their teams. Some key questions to focus and answer-

How is this different from your Mission, Values, Goals & Strategy?

Is there a need to change from the current vision?

Are there minor tweaks required or a complete overhaul demanded?

Where does the CX vision align with that of organization? Where is the gap?

How can we align the team with the CX vision?

2. Developing & executing a strategy: The second step is to build & execute a series of actions and journeys to differentiate your brand, exceed customer expectations and ensure this is adhered to long term to beat competition and grow. The key is to focus on how you are going to make your customers & employees feel having interacted with you.

What are the Moments of Truth?

Any ahaa moments? How do we capitalize on these?

Are there remarkable experiences that you have created for them?

Have you been consistently decreasing the share of pain points?

What is the compelling reason for your customers to keep coming back to you?

3. Onboarding a great team: Culture, the way of working, some basic protocols are all finalised and implemented by people. Its all about the human connections, which is so critical in having the right self-motivated team to drive CX. With a WFH or even a hybrid way of working- the fitment to our goals and the individual being self-accountable, will make or break a team.

How do you engage, develop, align and keep your employees motivated for the long run?

How do you ensure that they are productive and have an impact on other people, processes, and technology adoption?

Are they able to make a transformation for your customers and the organization in “true” sense?

Are there fresh ideas and concepts or has the team become complacent on their past success?

How do we attract the best talent from the industry?

4. Focus on the results

Numbers matter. You can’t action, what you don’t measure. Simple.

The right set of people hired will deliver results, but the quantum and direction of change will determine if you are outpacing your competition. The aim should be that once conquered a goal post, then to achieve even higher performance areas.

Are our customers happier, satisfied than the last quarter? Last week?

Are we able to successful resolve, queries, complaints, and request- in the first attempt? To their satisfaction?

Are we able to calculate and arrest churn effectively?

Are we providing a differential experience, basis customer lifetime value?

Is it continuously getting easier for our sales team to close sales with decreasing cost of acquisition and less time to close?

Are we able to cross-sell/ up-sell our other solutions?

Is the CSM team able to grow the account?

5. Innovate for the future

Constant innovation and offering relevant to customer needs products and services is the key to remain in business. There are so many CX frameworks and ever evolving leadership models that the question is are we agile enough to change and at same time with a solid foundation to brace the storm with minimum deviation from the formulated Vision (remember step 1)

What will be the winning strategies?

How can we ensure on-going excellence?

How will we build resilience and creativity into the organization?

How do we keep ahead of the changes in competition’s business models, changes in markets and CX trends?

To summarise, a great & impactful leader should focus on knowing about the life & needs of your customer as a human being, and not as a unique identifiable field in your company’s CRM. Have a curious approach to keep learning more about your customers. There won’t be an organization existing, nor a leader needed without the customer, so focus on them first.

At the end, as we focus on Customer Experience- while the Customer is the king, don’t forget to focus on your your experience- Learn from your failures, be bold, inspire and demand, be courageous and last but most important be humane.