I’ve been in several interviews for CX roles, some specific and some very vague. The worldview is either myopically focused on surveys/VOC (great place to start…) or is mistaking CX for customer support/success. These are not the same functions.

Throughout my job search and interviews, it’s clear to me that many organizations have no idea what a CX professional does, or ought to be doing.

In essence, to be a CX professional is to be a private investigator. They should be a resource to executives & leadership to identify & corroborate customer feedback with other business intelligence that serves to prioritize where the business can sharpen & refine it’s execution of the strategy to accelerate revenue generation, improve retention, and reduce long-term operating costs.

A career in CX requires individuals who have the agility & curiosity to understand the breadth & scope of the entire business when it comes to a customer’s journey, as well as all the inner workings of how & why the business is structured in the way it is to create that experience.

What it means to be in #CX:

You are a truth-teller.
In the face of so many people and departments with their own initiatives & priorities, a CX professional is here to surface facts that may have been overlooked (on purpose) and may be hard to swallow. That could be because the data you’re presenting is showing a disconnect from what customers need/want/expect and the performance of a team or department according to internal metrics. What’s difficult about this is ensuring you have the skills to present data agnostically and collaboratively without sounding accusatory. Remember, organizations grow & adapt rapidly to take advantage of market opportunities – many times nobody is ensuring that the short-term solution is built for long-term success or auditing it later to make sure it’s still working or relevant.

You are an investigator.
In the words of a wise woman, you better do your homework. In CX, you may get glimpses of insights from your feedback loops (whether surveys, social media, review sites, call center data, behavior/engagement data from your products), but you have to quantify the size of those issues and the impact of that experience on the broader business metrics. Is this problem preventing renewals? Is this a friction point that causes customers to abandon the product or service? What’s the cost of doing nothing? What’s the upside of addressing this issue – what results would we see aside from NPS/CSAT scores going up? You have to diagnose the root cause and then ladder it up to things the rest of your business stakeholders care to accelerate change.

You are a litigator & mediator simultaneously.
As a CX pro, you’re going to have to float between varying interests within a business, much less the politics and egos also present. Even in the most egalitarian organizations, there are people who are more entrenched in their positions & beliefs and harder to win over with your evidence & analysis. In that case, you have to know how to build a system of champions and win through influence rather than brute force of facts. You may also be presenting data (see ‘truth’ above) that may incriminate certain practices or behaviors that have been the norm by a team for a good number of years that aren’t so positive. You will need to approach this with tact, a spirit of collaborative creativity, and a focus on how to improve both the micro and the macro as a result.

You are a therapist.
Listening skills and empathy are required to keep you above the heated emotions that may emerge, from either customers or your internal stakeholders. How do you create space for people to fully tell their story, unleash their pent up frustration (or satisfaction!)? It’s important to remember that in CX, you’re sometimes the first responder to people who have been suffering or needing help for a very long time. I’ve dealt with customers who were relieved to have an outlet to talk about their pain points and what was going well and utilized me/my team as a point of contact when other touchpoints were ignoring them or M.I.A. I’ve also had many a chat with internal employees about their experience in their role, the lack of support from the tooling/tech in place, lack of direction from management, or the inconsistency in terms of training & day to day operational practices. I’ve always found talking to real people to be useful especially when you can record those convos and you play their stories aloud to executives who hear REAL people talking about what they need/want from the business. That far outweighs all my storytelling & data.

You are an advocate.
In every meeting, I tend to be the person who raises my hand (kidding – I lose that decorum in about week 3 of any new job) and asks about what the impact will be of this decision or change for our customers. And what’s the impact of the change management across our teams who are front-line employees that deal directly with our customers. I’ve experienced many teams driving changes in onboarding or billing or product dev and customer support is left in the dark. As much as CX is an advocate for the customer, we also have to be an advocate for other employees & teams.

You are a strategist.
You have to be able to think big picture and help community why the company is focusing on CX, what the CX strategy & position is & why, and how that relates to individual contributors. Whether the strategy is defined or not from the business level, you have to think about how changes to the experience will help the org achieve that goal and be clear where & how you’ll measure the micro CX data in relation to the macro business metrics. It’s not enough to say “customer experience is important.” No shit. As I outlined in my other post on creating a strategy statement, what reasonable business would ever say “customer experience isn’t important”? Actually, I think this is the federal government’s position…and perhaps every cellular service provider. I digress & hopefully you get my point.

You are a tactician.
You’re going to need to piecemeal together a lot of dirty data because nobody else has. You’re going to have to be a tech savant and learn how to utilize your experience platforms like Qualtrics or Medallia, as well as have a grasp on how to utilize your organization’s CRM or CDP, be capable and comfortable working with BI teams or data engineers to identify gaps & stopgaps to missing data. My point is, CX pros shouldn’t live in an ivory tower and just build decks on survey feedback and distribute to no effect or action across the organization. As I said above, when you’re a first-responder, you’re the first on the scene and you’re going to have to do some pretty rudimentary pick & shovel work to get a baseline or benchmark set up. But this is also where you become the closest person to all the data and insights which enables you to be the truth-teller. Now, you may not be fully skilled in SQL or data mining, and that’s where you find people throughout the business to partner with and ask for help and then send Starbucks gift cards after. Don’t wait around for someone to save you. Figure it out.

You are a problem-solver.
You cannot be the person who only identifies problems. Now, in some organizations maybe that’s all that’s asked of you, but for me…I’m not content not also identifying viable solutions that should be scoped and my experience has shown me that waiting for others to come up with a solution leads to time wasted. I believe that as you identify problems, you need to also be prepared to show opportunities to solve or remediate those problems. Whether that’s through a process change, a product improvement, a policy review, or analysis of how people are utilized in the customer’s journey. But remember that you should never present work you don’t want to execute. It’s like when an ad agency shows creative they don’t like – that’s usually what the client picks! Well, don’t do that. Show the solutions you would endorse and get behind, but also be able to speak to other scenarios that department leaders or executives bring up. “Why wouldn’t we do this?”

You are a canary in a coal mine.
Unless you’re in an organization with a robust & mature CX discipline, you’re probably going to be on a small team or a team of one. And in many cases, that can feel like an inordinate amount of pressure because you’re the person seeing all the feedback about what’s wrong (or what’s right! which is equally important to share) and feeling like you cannot get the organization to make change. My advice to you is to work with those who are eager to adapt & improve. If you’re finding yourself in a situation with a group or team that feels like you’re banging your head against the wall, move on to those eager for your help. Scale what you can in terms of insights & access to reporting/data so that your time is better spent consulting rather than building reports or decks that go unread. A role in CX is to be at the forefront of many emerging & changing customer needs or desires that may be new to the business.

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The role of a CX professional has to be nimble to move between thinking & operating at the micro and macro levels of the business their in. You need to be the person who is hitting the ‘zoom out’ button on the Google Earth of your business and remember that you may be on of the only people looking at or thinking about this larger picture from the lens of true customer journey end-to-end.

As I said at the beginning, the challenge organizations face is that they either don’t know where to start or they’ve started with surveys & VOC but have no idea how to scale. That’s why being a strategic thinker who can craft & build a strategy, but more importantly a more palatable vision of where we’re going & why & how life will be better if we do all this work, is necessary and that if you hire someone to run surveys and just build decks or reports of feedback, you’re missing a huge opportunity for value creation in your organization.