Top 5 CX skills for the future - We can't succeed without them

I recently wrote about the five steps required to radically rebuild CX. It's one thing to know what needs to be done, and quite another to have the skills required to do it. Now I want to propose the five most important skills that I believe the CX leaders of the future must have. But first, I want to provide some historical context by talking about how skill requirements have been changing in a closely allied profession over the last 30 years or so.

Context

The main thing we CX leaders have been concerned about up to now is making our CX survey and improvement process work as well as it possibly can. We have been sitting over in our own corner, talking our own language, interacting with others only when something unusual is revealed by our surveys. I feel we have been unjustifiably proud of ourselves for what we have done.

Meanwhile, other teams in our companies have achieved true digital transformation, notably our friends in marketing. Think about what they have gone through. If we go back to 1990, their methodologies were primitive, and now they seem to be 100% digital, tracking customers from awareness to consideration, all the way through to renewal and referral by digital means. We have moved much more slowly. Back in 1990 the main technology we used to gain new customer insights was the telephone.

Starting early in the new millennium, we moved towards NPS surveys, sent out via email. That’s still our main technology. (Our marketing colleagues are sniggering at us over in their corner.)

Since 2020, we find ourselves in a situation where CX early adopters have started to use machine learning to understand what is happening. Ever-declining survey response rates make this more urgent, but most of us have been sticking to what we know, putting our profession and indeed ourselves at risk.

We have to make this move, and we have to make it now. Most of us have to admit that we do not have the necessary skills. We need to learn them quickly. I believe five specific skills are the most important, and that is what I want to discuss now. The first of these skills is to . . .

Embrace the operating perspective

This first skill, embracing the operating perspective, is all about determining which customer-touching operational improvements should be prioritized to improve corporate results, then ensuring such improvements happen. I see two points as important here. First, we should be aiming to identify the improvements in priority order. We should be proposing very few of them to senior management. I suggest that you suggest no more than three. (In practice, I think people should also show what was in fourth and fifth place on the list, just in case the approver’s pet project did not make the top three.) Proposing twenty projects is pointless. On top of the complex approval process for a long list, you would never be able to demonstrate the relationship between the actions and the results if you do so many things simultaneously.

Second, we need to say what we mean by ‘results’ and deliver insights into them much more frequently. In the new world of CX, an annual refresh of brand-level NPS research (the old way of doing things) is not nearly enough. For most businesses, ‘results’ will look like an improvement in Net Recurring Revenue by customer and business area. That should be available monthly, at the very least, and is a good way to provide insights other parts of the company value and trust.

Is the percentage (including both renewals and cross/up-selling) better than it was last month and better than last year? Under that top-level number, we need to track the most important single operational metric from our top three improvement initiatives. If your major corporate functions each want their own top-level CX metric, I suppose you would be better off using your analytics to tell them which of their metrics matters most for Net Recurring Revenue, rather than saying their work does not make much difference.

I also believe there should always be no more than three customer-centric operational improvement initiatives that are tracked at company level. When the first one meets its completion criteria, replace it with a new initiative.

In summary, as far as embracing the operating perspective is concerned, I consider it urgent to worry less about surveys and more about how each and every business and function in your company works, and how they measure their own success.

Now, let's go on to the second skill on our list.

CX leaders need to greatly improve their understanding of data and systems

?We all have a natural tendency to believe our own area of expertise is complex, and everyone else’s is relatively simple. Unless a CX professional has been promoted from a specific operating function, they almost certainly know next to nothing about things that are not part of the CX survey and reporting process. The issue is that they usually believe they know quite a lot. (For those of you who disagree with what I have just written, I suggest looking up the Dunning-Kruger effect.) But across the board, CX leaders need to dig in and learn more about data and systems.

?A good starting point would be for the revolutionary CX leaders we need for tomorrow to sit with people who are doing the actual work in each major corporate team. Learn what IT systems they use, what data they enter, and what reports are produced from each system. Finally, understand which operational metrics each team uses to measure its own performance. If you are looking for a good place to start, go for your sales team and their use of Salesforce. If you are in a SaaS company, you might like to start with the software and team that track customer adoption of your product. And ensure you understand any systems your company already uses that are what is known as Customer Data Platforms, such as Snowflake.

We need to understand precisely which of these many data points and trends have the greatest impact on customer and financial outcomes. The sheer volume of such data means it is impossible to do it manually, so we need to adopt machine learning tools to succeed.

?A deep understanding of all of the systems and data that represent your company’s interactions with customers is absolutely critical to success in the new age of CX. If you feel this is too hard, you probably need to change jobs.

And the next new skill we all need is . . .

The ability to see problems across multiple functional areas

?Based on OCX Cognition experience, you will often learn that data points that have strong predictive value for customer and financial outcomes represent customer-touching processes that cross internal team boundaries. Just to pick one B2B example, think of an order acceptance process that includes checking that a product from a third-party will be available to build what the customer wants, and also includes customer credit approval. And what if the customer has asked for delivery in multiple countries, including one where you have no local presence? Only someone outside each of the individual teams will be able to see the order acceptance process as what it is:?a problem that crosses multiple functional areas. This means you, the CX leaders of the future.

Now I would like to communicate the fourth key skill on my list.

Communication skills

Communication skills have always been important for CX professionals, but I argue that the profession needs a reset. We CX professionals need to publicly admit that we oversold the extent of our customer and operational knowledge in the past. Showing this level of vulnerability will help our audience to accept what we are now going to communicate.

The CX revolution means that we move our communication language from ‘CX speak’ to the operational language that each of our internal teams speaks every day. We talk in terms of their systems, their metrics, and their operational processes. We are able to clearly demonstrate how much the critical operational processes affect outcomes, and why. And of course, we have to do this in a way that does not put our audiences to sleep. Yes, the numbers are important, but if you only speak in numbers, your audience will turn off. It is critical to use customer quotes and stories to make your messages stick.

And the final new skill priority on my list is . . .

Move from a process focus to an outcome focus

While we have spoken a lot about processes up to now, I want to be clear that understanding and improving critical processes is a means to an end. We always have to be clear about the outcomes we seek and how we are progressing against those targets, and that focus would represent a big shift for CX professionals, who have tended to concentrate on processes, not outcomes.

There are two levels to such outcomes. The first is the top-level corporate outcome, for example, improving Net Recurring Revenue from 97% to 108% over 18 months. The second level, from a CX leader’s perspective, is the share of progress towards that target that each of the major initiatives is going to produce. Strategic initiatives involve concentrating scarce financial and human resources on a small number of things that matter. These initiatives must have clear success and completion criteria. When achieved, the financial and human resources should be moved to a new initiative.

Conclusion

Yes, I believe these five skills are all we need to be successful in the new data-centric world. And that data-centricity is why I have put 'Data & Systems' at the center of the diagram below.

As always,I don't claim to always be right. I do claim to have opinions that are backed up by at least some facts, so feel free to continue to (occasionally) disagree with me. It's good for my ongoing education.

Webinar replay avaialble - Seeking Leaders for the Predictive CX Revolution

Here is a webinar discussing the same five skills I have described above. See what Richard Owen has to say about them. Listen to the answers given to questions from people like you. Here is how we describe the webinar:

CX needs a revolution. It’s limping along just as companies need customer insights more than ever. Revolutions need leaders – do you have what it takes? Replay our webinar for a call to action and a detailed discussion of the path forward. It’s critical, because the companies whose CX insights will propel them ahead of their competition during tight times will need a new way of understanding customers – all customers, all the time, all the way through every operational and strategic layer. And the CX leaders who learn to deliver it will thrive.

Notes

OCX Cognition predicts customer futures. Our breakthrough SaaS solution, Spectrum AI, lets enterprises transform what’s possible in customer experience. Reduce your customer risk, break down silos, and drive speedy action – when you can see what’s coming, you can change the outcome. Building on more that 15 years of CX-focused expertise, we’ve harnessed today’s advances in AI, elastic computing, and data science to deliver on the promise of customer-driven financial results. Learn more at?www.ocxcognition.com.

Maurice FitzGerald is a retired VP of Customer Experience for HP's $4 billion software business and was previously VP of Strategy and Customer Experience as well as Chief of Staff for HP in EMEA. He and his brother Peter, an Oxford D.Phil in Cognitive Psychology, have written three books on customer experience strategy and NPS, and a fourth book that focuses on Peter's cartoon illustrations for the first three. All are available from Amazon.

The author can be reached here on LinkedIn or [email protected]. Please let me know what you think and what sort of content you would like to see here.