How to Succeed in Your CX Role

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The following article is an edited chapter from?The CX Leader Handbook , a guide to help you learn how to find the right customer experience job, thrive as a leader, and strategically plan for the future, written in partnership between?GetFeedback ?and Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CEO of?Experience Investigators .?The full guide is no longer available.

Congratulations on getting that CX job! Now it’s time to set yourself up for success.?

Step 1: Get the lay of the land?

Before you can set appropriate goals, build relationships with leaders and teams, or even analyze customer feedback, make sure you have the right tools to get started. Take the time to understand the following elements of your organization:?

• Vision, values, and mission.?These should serve as a guide for your goals and help you align with what’s most important to the organization and its leaders
• Team structures, accountability, and stakeholders.?Understand who your stakeholders are and where you might want to focus in building relationships first. It’ll be critical to building CX coalitions and getting buy-in
• Any known customer issues.?If there are existing customer challenges that create friction, poor feedback scores, or otherwise, find them early. Issues can help you prioritize where to put efforts for some initial wins. If there are existing customer journey maps, now is a great time to review those, too

Step 2: Establish the foundation for success??

The good news is that?more than half?of customer experience employees (61%) report having stated OKRs around their program. The less-than-good news is that some of those goals may not be defined in the best way for CX leaders to accomplish their goals.

Understand what customer experience means at your organization and how you can create the biggest impact. Refer to the following checklist.

1. Define what success means and how it will be measured??

Be realistic here; narrow the focus based on time and resources. Prioritize outcomes. It’s easy for “success” to be defined by tactics, like “send 10,000 surveys this month.” But what is the outcome that will drive customer experience success? The surveys are only useful if the customer insight is used to improve the customer journey.

2. Set goals that are tied to the overall organizational success

According to the Momentive report,?Bold Decisions , the three top priorities for CX leaders is boosting customer loyalty, collecting customer feedback, and increasing upsells and cross-sells. The additional challenge is for customer experience leaders to clearly demonstrate how these CX goals improve the bottom line.

Continuing with the example outlined above, what will gathering more customer feedback in better ways do for your organization? If the feedback is used to drive action, then it can improve customer retention, renewal rates, upsells, cross-sells, and more.?

What’s most important to your leaders? That’s where you start.

3. Build coalitions with other leaders?

CX professionals or teams that significantly collaborate cross-functionally are?27% more likely?to have a “high” or “very high” rate of ROI on their program. They’re also three times more likely to have a high business impact compared to those who engage in little or no collaboration at all.

Work with other leaders in your organization who are accountable for making changes and supporting the work you lead. Start early by building relationships with leaders in research, marketing, learning and development, and of course customer service and customer success.

Step 3: Assess the organization’s current CX maturity level?

Knowing how mature an organization is when it comes to the various elements of customer experience management can help determine how to prioritize your efforts.

GetFeedback’s CX Maturity Quiz ?includes nine different elements to evaluate. Stepping into a new role is a great time to ask for support from other leaders. Ask a few key teams to complete the quiz from their perspective. Once the results are in, compare your findings with?the 2022 State of CX Maturity report.

Here is what you can expect to gain from each team’s honest assessment:?

• Current CX team members:?their perspective should help you see the barriers are impeding success?
• Customer support leaders and team members:?these important agents interact directly with customers and have valuable, real-time insights
• C-suite leaders who are both directly and indirectly involved with customer experience initiatives:?The CHRO, CMO, and CEO all need to feel connected and have buy-in to provide the right resources in the future. Involving them early is a good way to build relationships and set expectations
• Customer Success:?this team interacts directly with customers and hears feedback regularly. Their perspective is also vital to understanding the true customer journey
• Data analysts and technology leaders:?involve them to begin conversations about needs for data visibility, necessary tools, and how to best work together

Don’t be shy! Build relationships early so you can gain support as needed. Remember, leaders of mature CX programs value teamwork and cross-collaboration more than those?of less established organizations.

As you gather results, keep records so you can compare maturity levels later in your journey. You also might find that different assessments within your organization provide very different results. That alone is a compelling finding.

Storytime: Mary the new Chief CX Officer??

Customer experience leadership is an evolving role. That means leaders must continuously evaluate, refine and communicate about their goals, their progress, and how it all positively impacts the organization. Let’s walk through an example of how a CX leader might approach assessing the customer experience maturity inside their organization.?

Mary was just hired as Chief Customer Experience Officer reporting to the CEO. She is the first CX hire the organization has made at such a senior level, but there already are some customer experience roles and teams throughout the company.

The organization––let’s name it ABC––has a customer insights team that organizes, designs, and sends regular customer surveys. These include both relational and transactional feedback methods. The team reports the findings regularly via a shared dashboard.??

ABC is well-versed in tracking metrics like CSAT and NPS, and it’s dabbled with customer journey mapping. However, Marketing and other teams have their own version of what great customer experience looks like, how it's done, and what actions to take to improve it.

Mary has been asked to do more with that feedback and bring ABC’s customer experience management forward. She realizes early on that leaders and teams don’t have a common language or goals around delivering a great customer experience. So she decides to?assess the maturity levels of the nine key elements?within the organization.?

She reaches out to her fellow C-suite leaders to determine if the CMO and the CFO are congruent in their assessments. Mary also connects with the Customer Support leaders, including contact center supervisors. After learning who has used customer journey maps, she reaches out to those leaders too.

Mary tracks the results and realizes quickly that there is some alignment on customer feedback collection, but not when it comes to CX strategy, culture, or technology and tools. She now has a clear picture of what she needs to prioritize first. She puts together a plan to communicate, educate, and work with leaders that will help to gain their buy-in on a new, holistic customer experience strategy.

She also asks a CX analyst to gather more information on why there is a lack of alignment around technology and tools. Once they audit what is being used, they can make smart recommendations on whether the existing tools should be used more efficiently or there needs to be a more robust techstack.

On a regular basis, Mary connects with each leader about their CX plans and progress across the customer journey. After a year in her role, she asks leaders and teams to take the maturity assessment again. She then identifies next steps based on the results. This process and open communication repeats, keeping momentum needed to gain the program buy-in she needs from across the organization.

Step 4: Build your CX team and foster the right skills

CX Leaders are often brought in before they have a team. Your team might start building slowly––that’s fine. Most CX professionals work in a group where two to 10 team members focus primarily on customer experience.

It’s worth noting that CX teams with more team members report higher return on investment (ROI) for customer experience. While most CX teams consist of two to 10 people, teams of 16 or more are?16% more likely?to say that the ROI they generate from their programs is “high” or “very high.”

How do you find the right employees? And what’s the ideal structure of your team??

There are no perfect answers, but ideally, your CX team should be able to:?

1. Set up a CX strategy and communicate it throughout the organization
2. Leverage ongoing customer feedback to improve the customer experience
3. Communicate and share not just results, but the true voice of the customer
4. Work to include customer feedback from many places, including Customer Advisory Boards, customer interviews, observational studies, and more
5. Design and innovate experiences for today and the future
6. Create consistent accountability with a cross-functional team via regular meetings, reporting, and action steps
7. Guide change management and socialize outcomes from CX efforts like measuring feedback and customer journey mapping
8. Work with other leaders to provide change management and guidance around what needs to happen to improve customer experience?

Skills and priority hires?

The top skills you should look for in your team members are problem-solving, teamwork, and the ability to cross-collaborate. This is especially true for customer service professionals whose roles have significantly evolved due to unexpected demands initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Skills and priority hires?

The top skills you should look for in your team members are problem-solving, teamwork, and the ability to cross-collaborate. This is especially true for customer service professionals whose roles have significantly evolved due to unexpected demands initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

To get started, consider where your greatest needs are. Many leaders bring on CX analysts early on. Analysts can help you design, implement, and analyze customer feedback research and programs.?

Consider not just what roles to fill, but how you can set up your team for success. When it comes to customer experience, the quality, visibility and actions from customer feedback must be an ongoing priority.

Many organizations use different?tools to collect customer feedback?across departments without a centralized feedback strategy. They might have a separate Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) platform that doesn’t integrate directly to their CX solution, or multiple journey maps built on just assumptions.?

Hiring an analyst will help you find out what tools are out there and where the data lives. You may want to explore not just what data is collected, but where, how, and why it’s being collected that way. Find the answers to these key questions:

Is everyone in the organization using the same tools??

Watch out especially for multiple survey solutions. It’s not unusual to see the Marketing department use one survey tool to collect feedback after events and the Customer Success org use another to evaluate annual client feedback. This often means that customer insights aren’t in a centralized location.

Is there a centralized place for customer data??

This can impact the visibility needed to create a seamless customer journey. If your Customer Support team sees only part of the customer’s story, it’s challenging to deliver personalized service. When teams hoard or hide customer information, that doesn’t set up CX leaders for success.

Do your reports show meaningful metrics, customer stories, and required action??

As a CX leader, you’ll be asked for results. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to take the insights from those tools and turn them into something easy to share and socialize. Ensure the way the technology shows results works well to share outcomes.

Bolster employee experience?

Customer feedback is not just about surveys; it’s about real-time analytics, exploring customer data, and hearing from customer-facing employees like customer service agents and customer success managers.

1. Empower employees by educating them on CX?

You can start informally: “lunch and learns” or internal webinars can help boost employees’ confidence in understanding how their efforts make a difference in the overall customer journey.?

Customer experience metrics are a great tool for bridging the gap between departments––like HR, Marketing, Finance, etc.––and fostering a more customer-centric culture.

Identify reasons to work together and collaborate. This might include working with Learning and Development on specific CX training or developing a more robust way to tie financial outcomes with customer experience efforts with Finance.?

Report those collaborative efforts out to the organization. Help the C-suite understand and appreciate how important cross-functional collaboration is regarding CX success.

2. Use CX best practices to drive the right culture

Leverage employee feedback to drive the right focus and actions within the organization. Show employees (via metrics) that their efforts are driving organization results.?

Create a Voice of the Employee (VoE) program. This can help you measure alignment and progress using the same metrics used in CX, like NPS. Leverage journey mapping in the employee journey, too. Identify ways to reduce friction, provide access to better tools and resources, and ideate ideal journeys for the future.

3. Ensure everyone on your team understands their role and responsibilities

Get everyone on the same page with clear definitions and goals. Document these roles and expectations in a CX team charter. Add to this as you add to the team. Clearly document expectations around meeting frequency and expectations. Come back often to the vision, values and mission of the organization, and how that applies to customer experience.

4. Be mindful of rewards and compensation?

Customer experience employees who believe they are well compensated are two times more likely to say their customer experience program sees “high” to “very high” return on investment (ROI).

This article is an edited chapter from?The CX Leader Handbook , a guide to help you learn how to find the right customer experience job, thrive as a leader, and strategically plan for the future, written in partnership between?GetFeedback ?and Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CEO of?Experience Investigators .?The full guide is no longer available.