Building Well Rounded CX Leaders

There are many paths to becoming a CX leader (a CX leader being anyone in a customer experience management role at any level). Many CX leaders come from experiences in marketing and contact center operations which offer critical perspectives on how customers want to interact with an organization.

CX leader professional development should span as many customer-facing roles as possible to fully develop a set of core skills to bring to an organization, especially at the Head of, Director, Vice President, and Chief Customer Officer levels of leadership. I have to revert to my military experience where every officer professionally develops throughout their career by working in various roles at increasingly larger organizational echelons with broader sets of responsibilities. The idea is to create a military leader who understands the tactical, operational, and strategic elements of combat, support, and service support operations (i.e., where the bullets, beans, and bandages come from to win the fight) by working jobs in supply, administration, intelligence, maintenance, procurement, joint (other branches), and combined (the military of other countries) assignments at various organizational echelons. The intended result is a well-rounded military leader who can employ the right capabilities to accomplish the mission.

Since customer experience management spans organizational silos, it behooves organizations and their CX leaders to understand how those silos operate, their strengths and weaknesses at balancing their objectives and incentives with the customer's demands. Therefore, I recommend that CX leader professional development include tours of duty in:

Sales. Externally, sales are where the brand meets the marketplace, person to person. It is where customer interaction generates the organization's reputation, how competitive and effective your pricing and quality of offerings is, what customers love, like, and loathe about the offerings and your company's ways of doing business. Trust and reputation get established between the people who buy and those who sell. Internally, sales are where you get the user experience of tools such as CRM, lead generation, contracting and statement of work development, legal review and signature. It's also where you see the seams in your silos as deals convert to wins and customers are onboarded, products are shipped, and customer service comes into the relationship. You learn the "special forces" of incentives and their impact on how customers are approached-transactionally for a sale or consultatively for a relationship. Sales is a very eye-opening experience that offers an essential grounding for CX leaders.

Customer?Service. Externally, customer service is the long tail of a customer relationship with a massive impact on customer sentiment towards the brand and any future purchases or advocacy. Service, as in sales, must interact with empathy to meet customer needs and help achieve their job-to-be-done. It plays a vital role in fulfilling the brand's promise and meeting, exceeding, or failing customer expectations. Internally, customer service is a hive of various processes, tools, skills, and metrics, all of which can teach a CX leader invaluable lessons on systems integration, agent interaction, and the use of customer data.

Contact Center.?Externally, call your contact center as a mystery shopper and see how that goes. Internally, sit with agents, and learn the processes and problems causing escalations, KPI-driven behaviors, the array and effectiveness of tools, systems integration, and real-time handling of pressure from customers.

Field Service. Externally and internally, CX leaders can ride along with field engineers on installation and service calls and see first-hand the workforce management, dispatch, spare parts, knowledge management, and support to effect repairs. This customer-facing role is an excellent source of first-hand learning about how your field service staff deliver on the brand promise and customer expectations.

Depot Service.?Visiting the depot to see how it operates to support customers and the various systems to remediate broken gear and interact with product management, engineering, and suppliers to address root causes of defects that cause outages and breakage disrupting customer's use. In addition, gain an understanding of how the product warranty impacts customers and how data from product performance affects finances and product development inside the organization. You can see first-hand the effects of launching a "mostly ready" product on the organization's support teams, finances, and customer experience.

Self Service?- Externally, use the tools your organization provides its customers to answer their questions, intervene in a stalled process, or enhance the experience with the offerings through tutorials and frequently asked questions (FAQ). Internally, understand the knowledge management process your organization uses to create and update FAQs and other self-service options, especially as offerings evolve - new product launches and sunsetting products for the end of life and end of service life.

Product Management. Externally, you can understand the organization's key offerings and how they present to the marketplace, as speeds-and-feeds, or solutions, or appealing to the organization's values, or all of the above. Internally, get a deep understanding of how any customer feedback makes its way into the product development and refinement processes, an essential aspect of a customer-centric culture.

Marketing. Externally, understand how customer expectations begin to be formed and what the brand promise is that customers expect from the organization's awareness campaigns, advertising, and promotions. Internally, gain an understanding of how aligned the various business units and departments are with the promise of the brand in their operations.

Digital & Innovation. Externally, digital is becoming the channel of choice for customers and companies and is a vast source of both traditional customer survey feedback and real-time interaction feedback on websites and mobile apps, revealing where customers search, interact, abandon or convert. Spending time with your User Experience (UX) team(s) and learning how they conduct research, A/B testing, branding, and use behavioral models based on customer interaction, will yield incredible benefits for the CX leader.

Fulfillment & Warehouse. Your customers may never see your warehouse operations (unless it makes the news after a traumatic weather event reduces it to rubble). Still, they will be significantly impacted by this vital logistics operation if your organization has one. This operation uses data in ways that you have to see to believe—fulfilling orders, shipping, replenishment, supplier management, automation, and robotics, and doing a stint in the warehouse will yield another level of understanding of how the organization effects the customer journey.

Executive Management.?CX leaders need to develop their business acumen regarding how the business operates and how executives make decisions. Spending time with your Chief Financial Officer to understand their thinking around customers, sales, cost management, and investment. Spend time with your Chief Operating Officer, who will likely oversee many of the organizational elements mentioned above. Sit with your Chief Commercial Officer sales executive and learn their strategies and motivations for driving top-line growth and addressing customer needs. The Chief Information Officer is an excellent investment of a CX leader's time and attention to understand the stack of applications and infrastructure in use, any outsourcing in IT, how investment priorities are decided, and the procurement processes. Exposure to the Board of Directors, or at least how they are approaching the concept of customer experience management for the organization's growth and sustainment, is excellent for seeing the "big picture" of your organization's CX program.

As a CX leader at any echelon, you can acquire exposure to these departments either as a full-fledged employee in those departments or by doing orientation stints with them for a few weeks. The benefits are enormous and include understanding how your organization operates, the level of customer-focus in the culture, and building your internal network, which is essential for every CX leader. You will also develop your knowledge, skills, and abilities within the organization and, in time, become one of the rare leaders with a broad organizational perspective and insight to finding issues, understanding the web of interaction across the organization, and finding solutions with cross-functional collaboration.

I highly recommend that C-suite executives invest in this kind of well-rounded CX leader professional development program and build a bench of well-prepared leadership talent to help the organization innovate, compete, and win customer loyalty. It won't cost you six million dollars, but it could help you earn that much and more.