CXM vs. CSM Skills & Certificates

Context was the most fascinating discovery for me in learning about eastern culture. For clear communication, collaboration, and follow-through as I was leading CX company-wide, I needed to learn how Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, and others convey respect. I learned how eastern decision-making is much less individual-based and much more team-based as a member of their natural family, corporate family, national family, etc. Like concentric circles.

Contextual thinking is systems thinking.

What's that? Connection: what leads to what, who depends on whom. Sounds like a journey map, service blueprint, etc.

Why is this important to you?

CSM is a subset of CXM

• Customer Support and Customer Success management are 80% external-focused, interfacing directly with customers, with company-centric metrics for customer retention as your company's survival.
• Customer Experience management is 80% internal-focused, embedding customer voice into running your business, with customer-centric metrics for customers' value as your company's differentiator.

CXM connects the dots between customers and every work role company-wide -- including your company's suppliers and partners.

When every role is singing from the same page, so to speak, greater harmony reduces CS issues and costs. It frees-up trouble-shooting resources for value creation to drive new revenue opportunities. That's a much bigger play than CS upselling and cross-selling.

This is why CXM multiplies profit and revenue.

Here's what CXPA's website says for . . .

What is CXM:

Every company has CSM, but . . .

Do you have CXM?

It's ensuring every work role company-wide sees:

• How they are affecting CS costs.
• How their decisions affect customers' happiness and unhappiness.
• How their salaries, budgets, and profit-sharing are funded by customers.
• How their alignment to customers makes more funding available for everyone.

Yes, CS is affecting what customers experience -- but mostly due to lack of CXM!

What customers experience before CS is the outcome of every work role company-wide.

Last week I looked at Twitter/X posts for hashtag #CustomerExperience -- and more than 90% are CSM topics -- not CXM.

What happens when CXM is missing? Higher costs, more revenue pressure, lower integrity, bad CS/CX, lower empowerment, less productivity, less coordination and collaboration, more inquiries to CS, more pressure to automate/offshore/etc., lower loyalty, austerity, layoffs, . . . a vicious circle!

CSM Skills & Certificates

In the 2020s, to-date, most "customer experience" classes, webinars, conferences, books, technologies, and certificates are actually "customer support" or "customer success" or "experiential marketing".

For example, CX Academy based in Ireland courses are clearly for Customer Support. COPC is obviously for Customer Support. Forrester, Bain, and others are typically focused on experiential marketing: how to get customers to engage.

Just because something is labeled as "CX ___" does not make it CXM.

CXM Skills & Certificates

CXM is getting every manager to engage in aligning to customers.

In 1991, I read a book called The Customer-Driven Company. It changed my life, along with Fred Reichheld's 1990 HBR article, Zero Defects: Quality Comes to Services. Take a look! What companies were doing then -- before CRM and CX/CS tech and experiential marketing -- was more customer-centric than many companies are today.

True CXM courses show you how to:

• Influence every work group across your company to get in-sync with customers' preferences.
• Prevent issues in the end-to-end customer journey -- not just make up for issues.
• Connect employee experience of all work groups to customer experience and partner experience and investor experience.
• Show executives that their strategy decisions have customer experience effects built-in.
• Focus managers on customers' value as their path to personal value and investor value.
• Help every work group use customer-focus as they create products, services, processes, policies, reviews, rewards, etc.

Where can you get these skills and certificates?

• CCXP has the best coverage of CXM. It's a tough exam, but it's least biased as it's designed by CX practitioners themselves.

• ClearAction's Customer Experience Excellence Certificate is earned by answering 15 scenario questions to demonstrate your mastery of ClearAction's 100% CCXP Exam Preparation course.

• Experts in customer/employee/partner experience can earn ClearAction's Experience Leadership Certificate by successfully answering 15 scenarios in our CX+EX+PX Experts Leadership masterclass. This course is for executives and past CCXP recipients, along with FCXPs/etc., keynoters, authors, etc.

• Leaders' Masterminds are hands-on live remote workshops to apply CXM to your revenue roadblocks and profit potholes. By completing a 4-week mastermind series, you can earn the Experience Leadership Certificates for Customer-Aligned Performance, Customer-Aligned Efficiencies, Customer-Aligned Strategies, and/or the Customer-Aligned Growth.

Outdated CX Practices

What's outdated? Anything not keeping up with today's needs.

CSM without strong CXM is not keeping up.

It's falling short significantly -- just ask any consumer: rising prices, shrinking sizes, lower quality, fewer new-and-improved declarations, harder to get to a real person, etc.

Updated CS tech with outdated CXM practices wastes your budget and squanders potential ROI significantly!

Examples of outdated VoC practices:

And that's the tip of the iceberg in VoC alone -- not to mention outdated practices in CX metrics, design, culture, and strategy.

Newbies and well-accomplished long-time CX experts alike in my Experts, CCXP, and Mastermind sessions nearly fall off their chair in amazement at what they discover, page by page, as described here:

What's Next?

Walking the CX talk is weak. Same for walking the EX talk!

Maturity of CX and EX is extremely low, and the numbers have never been above 10% in the past 15 years since it was tracked. (!!) "Embed" + "Scale" (Align) are CXM maturity tiers. Our CXM was in these top 2 tiers when I was VoC Manager -- due to my strategy as a young person -- so, there's no reason why you cannot achieve Embed + Scale/Align in 2025!

By the way, this webinar was designed for you to share with your executives:

This is why we have 6 major initiatives underway at ClearAction to help you drive walking the talk.

1. Executives' Guide to CX Value is a 5-part article series for you to share with your senior leaders. The 1st issue focuses on revenue risks. (no cost to you!)
2. 25 Bad CX Practices to Stop in 2025 is a 4-part article series for you to share with your CX, EX, and PX teams (Marketing, Sales, Success, Support, HR, People & Culture, Org Dev, etc.). The 1st issue focuses on insults. (no cost to you!)
3. Customer Alignment Leaders Podcast is a 20-minute LinkedIn Live interview with the rare CX Leaders who've engaged their executive team in walking the talk. (no cost to you!)
4. CX Leadership Value Newsletter is a weekend opt-in-only how-to guide for multiplying CX value via customer alignment strategy. (no cost to you!)
5. Goal Booster Guides are quick-to-the-point self-paced training with coaching (usually less than 2-3 hours total) or masterminds for any managerial level to exceed your 2025 CX goals. (usually less than usd500)
6. Walk The Talk Forum: CX=EX=Growth is officially launching big next week! This is an online community taking CXM to the next horizon. Through 5-minute learning guides, member events, and peer discussions, you'll take CXM much farther than CCXP or FCXP or any of the above resources can do. (priced for your whole team!)

CXM brings contextual thinking into your company, centered around customers as everyone's purpose. When you emphasize connections -- what leads to what, who depends on whom -- you see greater mutual respect and everything good that comes with that!