CX Should Be a Large Org
Debbie Levitt ????
LifeAfterTech.info ???? & dcx.to - Strategist, author, coach, researcher, and designer finding & solving human problems. "The Mary Poppins of CX and UX"
I received a four-star review for my Customers Know You Suck book on Goodreads that said that it was unreasonable for me to suggest that CX should be a large organization. The person reviewing it didn’t indicate what size of an organization they thought CX should be. One person? Limit it to five people?
Certainly an organization that includes CX, UX, and all of their sub-pecialties could easily be a large organization.?
I often compare it to Engineering.?
Our company doesn’t just have one type of Engineer; we’ve broken people into sub-specialties. We have Developers, QA, and we might have DevOps. We might have broken Developers into further sub-specialties, such as those who mostly or only work on the back-end, the front-end, or APIs.
Engineering organizations are larger partially because we need them to do so many types of work. And partially because if we want this huge bulk of work completed faster, we must hire more specialists. We couldn’t complete work well or quickly with one Engineer per team.
If Developers frequently ran late and missed estimations, throwing some Marketing staff at them to help code probably wouldn’t achieve our goals. Given how much help and work reviews non-Developers would need, it could slow us down further. This leads us to request a budget for more Devs, and grow the Engineering org with specialists.
What about our CX?org?
The sub-specialties included under this larger umbrella include:
Like our Engineers, we could easily build up a sizable department of these people because the specialized tasks the above people do are all important. We have a lot of work that needs to be done, and we want it done efficiently.
If you want your research work done faster, throwing someone from Marketing at it might not help if they don’t have a background in this type of research. Helping that Marketer, teaching them as they go, checking their work, or redoing their work would slow research and Researchers down.
If CX staff frequently ran late and missed estimations, throwing some Marketing staff at them to help with their tasks probably wouldn’t achieve our goals. Given how much help and work reviews non-CXers would need, it could slow us down further.
When we value CX work, the department would naturally be?larger.
When you value CX and UX work, you want to hire more people into those roles. Knowing their value means it’s easier to justify the budget you would be requesting.
You know that CX and UX work is valued when everybody wants to do it. Everybody wants to research, design, find and solve problems, write copy, map journeys, and improve current experiences. These used to be solely the domain of CX and UX jobs; now, many roles want to do this because the work has immediate value. The more value someone can show they are bringing to the company, the more they hope their job won’t be cut. When people want to do more high-value work, they do what most directly makes companies money. That’s often strategy, research, design, and coding.
Research and development, especially if you want to do them well, are investments.?
Whether you have a formal R&D department, or your CX, UX, or Service Design practitioners essentially function as your R&D department, this takes time and costs money.
The cost of any worker or team of workers can be scary when we don’t understand or calculate the ROI of that investment. Companies like to pretend they don’t know the value of CX or UX. But we have many hints that they know the value, and I’ve written many articles about this.
When we understand the value of a role or job, we know that what we pay workers costs much less than the benefits they?bring.
We know that even where there are zero CX or UX professionals from any subspecialty on our teams or at our company,
There isn’t a way to avoid doing this work, but there are many ways to avoid investing in having the work done better or more efficiently by qualified and skilled people.
The problem is that many non-CX and non-UX workers do CX and UX work poorly. Again, throwing “anybody” at work we need done doesn’t mean the work is done well. If we need more CX and UX work done, and we want it done well, then we are growing our CX/UX org.
“Product” and “Agile” frameworks claim they want empowered teams that include UX practitioners.
At many companies, they really don’t. As soon as it looks like we need to grow a CX or UX team or department, someone will claim that this work is easy and anybody can do it. Someone will claim CX work as part of their domain, and often want to keep it from themselves, turning the CX workers we hired into assistants and order takers.
This breaks the promises in our CX and UX job descriptions and hiring process. Candidates spend a month or more having six interviews and a take-home challenge to win a job at our company. We start with hundreds of applicants and narrow them down to the most talented and skilled for the level we want to pay for.
Hire until there are no bottlenecks.
If you believe that CX or UX practitioners are slowing down your product or delivery teams, then you need more CX or UX practitioners. That’s it! The same thing you would do if you needed more Engineers because there are bottlenecks or more projects than the current teams can handle.
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As the CX and UX departments become larger, they will need more managers and leadership.?
They might need Directors or Vice Presidents of CX. They would answer up to a CXO (Chief Experience Officer), not a CPO, CTO, CIO, or other C-level executives.
People who don’t want a CX or UX department to have that much power don’t like the sound of this. They’re happier when Agile gives Engineers all the power over everybody else on what they call the Agile team. Or they’re happier when books about so-called great products give Product Managers all the power over what they call the Product team.
If CX starts having a real hierarchy and a larger number of workers, they would naturally have more power and autonomy. It would be clear that they are a strategic and tactical powerhouse that the company shouldn’t live without, and should be growing.
I recommend a larger CX and UX org where sub-teams are allocated to or embedded with Product or Agile teams, whatever we call them this?week.
You probably don’t take one Engineer and tell them that they alone need to code and test everything about a particular product area. You might even laugh as you read that because it would make us so slow thatwe would feel like work isn’t getting done.?
Yet that’s what we do when we ask a CX or UX “team of one” to handle most or all of the UX specialties and tasks for an entire product area or, sometimes more ridiculously, multiple product areas. We’re setting this worker up to fail. And we’re setting the larger team up to hate and disrespect them for what has to be slow and poor work given their allocation.
At my company, at a minimum, we (at least) pair people?up.?
This means (at least) two Researchers and two Designers. Depending upon the type of project, it could be one Senior or Lead with someone more junior, even an apprentice or intern if the project isn’t very mission-critical. Same for Designers and others.
These are our sub-teams, or “teamlet” as I have heard them called. Maybe they are a “squad” of Researchers or Designers fully allocated to your project. Sounds good, right?
The benefits include:?
Having a minimum of two people on each CX squad is not an excuse to lay one of them off. They are not redundant. If your company didn’t take Engineering teams of 10 people and turn them into Engineering teams of five people by laying off half of them, then we don’t lay off half of a squad of two or three very important people.?
Build teams that get quality work done efficiently and aren’t creating a bottleneck or the perception of?one.
When we understand the value of a role or specialty, we understand the value of bringing on more people to get that work done more efficiently and higher quality.?
If we’re not afraid to build larger Engineering organizations, and some companies have been building larger Product Management organizations, why shouldn’t there be a larger CX organization??
This is especially true where we claim that CX or UX is part of our triad or trio, and is supposed to be equally empowered. It’s certainly not equally empowered when we have 100 Engineers and two Designers trying to be everything they need across every CX and UX sub-specialty and task.
When do you not need a larger CX or UX department??
If the idea of a large organization dedicated to the strategic and tactical work around understanding, improving, and innovating customer and user experiences sounds scary and like it’ll have no ROI, then it’s time to have some tough conversations there about your business goals, company values, brand promise, value proposition, and “empathy” for users.
But CX is dead and PMF eats it for breakfast and we don't need CX or UX people for growth and success!!! Right?
So says the former CX coach, now some sort of PMF coach, in my LinkedIn comments. So let's address who do we really need?
As of 2024, the only person we really need is the Engineer who codes the digital product and makes sure it gets out to the public. That's it. Everybody else is nice to have. Product Manager? Don't need. Project Manager? Don't need. PMF Consultant? Don't need. CPO? Nope. QA? No, that Engineer can check their code.
We could make an argument that we don't need anybody other than some techies that get digital stuff to customers. But, companies found over time that when they split off different specialties and let them do their work at least reasonably well, teams worked better. We had more success. We wasted less time and money.
We can pretend that we don't need CX or UX specialists to have success or growth. But that's a slippery slope snowball that picks up nearly everybody at our company as it rolls down the hill.
The question should be: what team do we need to build to have the most efficient growth and success? How do we balance wanting to be fast with wanting high quality with caring about outcomes, etc? It's a balance. If you care about outcomes and experiences, then your teams and hierarchy should include CX and UX specialists and experts.
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Senior Director Client Success & Operations - Aidin
9 个月I've never had a hard time hiring sales people. I say, you give me two more SDRs, we'll deliver 3x their salaries in sales. I'll hire two more each wave until that's not true. You can fire me if I'm wrong (and fire the SDRs I'm telling you to hire) and recoup all expenditure. Never had a CEO turn me down. CX lacks an equation that makes sense to executives. They care about profit and expense, and their eyes glaze over at the intangible, intractable story telling we do about CX. They're unwilling to invest in any form of CX, much less adopt a larger model. The maths don't math.
Senior Product Designer | User-Centered Design, UX Strategy, and User Research
9 个月Love this breakdown! I have often been the sole CX/UX person on a team, and while you can make it work you wind up having to deprioritize certain aspects of the work (most often research). Having a larger team not only eliminates the issue of a sole owner leaving, it also allows for better balancing of work so that no aspect of CX work is getting left behind.
Experience Research, Consumer Insights & New Product Innovation
9 个月What is more important to a company's success than the experience customers have with the organization? It determines the entire trajectory of the company, the success of its brand proposition and the likelihood that customers will do business with it (and recommend it) in the future.
Chief Customer Officer | Head of CX | C-Suite and Board Advisor | VOC & NPS Champion | I drive company growth and retention through better customer experiences
9 个月Have to disagree with you here, Debbie. CX can be successful as a smaller team, particularly if it has earned trust within the organization as a guide or shepherd. Secondly, if CX has to be a large team, then you are effectively saying that it doesn’t or can’t work in smaller companies or even mom-and-pop shops. And that I fundamentally disagree with. If you are paying attention to customer needs, acting on their feedback and seeking to remove friction from their experience, you can be successful even without a formal CX team.