How Should an Ideal CX Professional be Like?
Isn’t it all about the experience? About how things make us feel? And isn’t it obvious we want the answer to that to be good, soothing, easy, and comfortable? Well, making that sure is the job of a Customer Experience or CX Professional.
The relation with the visitor or customer is based on how they perceive your brand. It isn’t just the product through which they know you. It is the ride of thought in the mind of the customers about the very existence of your brand. Everything that they see, tells a story, and that’s why the experience of the story matters.
Once efforts are made to give the customer a satisfactory or rather, pleasing guidance from the moment they think of your brand, it sews a deep bond of trust. That’s the whole objective of a CX Professional and the actual customer experience meaning.
Making this bond always helps in the future of the company, as customers want to feel at home with the brand. And hence, a lot of companies that wish to make such a firm foundation among their customers are now extending themselves to enrich their customer’s experience.
Understanding the Work of a CX Professional in the Corporate World
A CX Team in a business generally comprises 3 kinds of people in the 3 different teams-
- The guys who design — The Design Team
- The guys who plan — The Planning Team, and
- The guys who manage — The Management and Operations Team
If you are looking forward to taking a step ahead in the CX field, here is the breakdown of the competencies that you must have according to each area mentioned above -
The Designing Guys
Solid understanding of What Customers Want
The CX Professionals that work in this area must need to understand the customers’ wants and needs pretty well. It will be okay if the Planning and Management Team is unaware of it, but the professionals working in this team must not miss the customers’ understanding by even an inch.
They are the ones who are going to pass on the customer expectations through designing to the people in the next 2 steps. Hence, it is very crucial that they must understand what the customer wants.
This can be done through Primary research and secondary research using Surveys, customer interviews, NPS Scores, Voice of Customers, Feedbacks, etc.
Know the Industry well
The company in which you are working, what is it actually selling? — This needs to be understood well. The CX Frameworks and scales must be understood really well as well by the CX Professionals in the designing team of the company’s CX department.
The Planning Guys
Well Aware of the Business Cycles
It is essential for CX professionals working in this team to know the business cycles of their companies very well. This means having information about when the business goes up and when does it descend, what is the seasonality of every product line as well as every category of your business?
The business cycles can be understood by observing the orders, sales, and business trends along with the most crucial customer purchasing times — kind of factors.
Know the Business Goals and Initiatives
Having a thorough understanding of the organization’s initiatives and business goals is a must for the CX Professional that is working in the Planning field of CX. It is because this goal can then be amalgamated with the ideas to improve customer experience through the CX Programs easily.
However, on the contrary, Shelly Chandler, from CCXP, mentioned in her Blog, ‘CX programs just feel “too far away” from revenue drivers’, which is, if not always primary, but a key goal of every organization. This defies the CX Professionals’ objective and states that customer experience skills are required to work upon.
So knowing the intentions behind the moves clears out the picture and helps these CX specialists provide the real customer experience meaning to the customers.
Understand the Numbers Well
Being in this area of the Customer Experience Field requires the CX professionals to understand the numbers very well. They need to be very comfortable with calculations and numbers as this will be required here most of the time.
Essential Business Program Management Skills
A CX Professional here will need to possess the skill of being an effective program manager. It is because once a plan is created, the next step is to effectively implement it with the help of managers which is a tough task.
Usually, managers do not listen to the executives that work under them. Hence, the executives must find a way to remove such roadblocks for effectively implementing the plan.
The Management and Operation Guys
Know the product and services well
A CX specialist should always know more than the customers and the key to this is knowing the services and products of the company well. This will help in analyzing the needs of customers in a better way ultimately leading to presenting them with the best solution.
Communication and Comprehension Skills
CX Professionals are nothing short of an army of researchers and mass communicators. They are present on multiple platforms to seek new ways of engaging customers and providing such information across departments for overall growth.
Along with internal communication, a customer professional expert would also focus on all the different channels a customer could use to contact for queries.
Hence, the CX Professionals in the Operations and Management area must understand what customers are saying. This will help them to communicate what they actually want to communicate, well.
Being Observant and Innovative
Observing the needs of the customer at every point builds a new meaning for the CX Professional to comprehend. As technology has advanced, chatbots take care of the small issues and their advantages are many as they save time, human resources and also help in queries, complaints, and suggestions, as a real person at assistance 24/7.
So that’s how customer experience specialists have some time to focus on more complex problems of the customer. It further helps them to work on those problems with the right customer experience skill incorporated by innovation.
Innovation is one of the customer experience skills too. It further amplifies into being creative when handling issues. Calabrio CMO Rebecca Martin said, “The ideal customer experience professional needs to be creative and possess a deep, detailed skill set to tackle more difficult questions — all while delivering the personalized, convenient solutions customers expect.”
Customer Empathy
Empathy is an important trait that a CX Professional must possess to creatively find an answer to a roadblock that the customer is dealing with.
CX Professionals here need to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and empathize with the problems of customers. Also, the customers must be ensured that their problems are important to the company and will be taken care of completely.
Taking Ownership
Many times while dealing with a customer or working on a solution, major problems arise that can not be a problem from a CX Professional’s end.
Even though it is related to tech or marketing or any other kind of department, the real responsibility of a CX specialist is to take ownership of the problem and make it go away through actions.
Now that you know a neat breakdown of how the CX department functions, here’s what you should additionally know as well.
Tech: The Catalyst to Becoming A Customer Experience Specialist
We are living in the future, keep this in your mind. So it goes without saying that CX Professionals will have to become more tech-savvy as Customers and their needs along with the technology are always going to get a bit more advanced.
To further enrich the customer experience meaning, in the coming days’ organizations are going to opt for Artificial Intelligence.
AI is the future and we have already stepped into its era.
According to Jen MacIntosh, VP of customer experience at Coveo - “AI and machine learning-based frameworks can meet support agents halfway, but employees will need to adapt to a world in which support programs will increasingly live within the products themselves instead of as a separate portal,” she said.
“By streamlining customer and employee processes across systems and channels, agents will be able to deliver better, faster service to customers.”
This tells how radically technology defines customer experience and how adapting to it is the only progressive way to become a customer experience specialist.
So, looking forward to becoming a great CX Professional?
Below are some online courses that can help you get started.
How to Get CX Certification Online
There are a variety of CX courses offered online that will define customer experience to help you elevate your game. They provide detailed material with advice from various customer experience experts. In these CX courses, you can also go through some case studies to help yourself with ideas to become a customer experience expert.
- Branding and Customer Experience; Offered by Coursera, conducted by IE Business School
- Customer Experience Management (CX) MASTERCLASS (2020); Offered by Udemy.
- Using Customer Experience to Grow Your Business; Offered by Udemy.
- Marketing: Customer Segmentation; Offered By lynda.com
Conclusion
Seeing the world around with so many opportunities growing in every aspect, customer experience is what soon every business will revolve around. So if you plan to step into it, make sure to provide and have a great experience for yourself.
