Learn more about my experience pursuing the Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) certification and why I think it’s important for individuals and organizations to understand the purpose and value of CX as a core business pillar.

Sticking Up For The Customer Not In the Room

In the last few years, I realized that my career has been rooted in experience-centricity. In every role I’ve had, I brightly started and stayed and performed my duties, staying in my assigned swim lane for ~60 days. After that, though, I begin poking around, asking people how all our different jobs are connected and how the disconnect we may have in our siloes within the four proverbial walls of our business impacts real people trying to purchase something or use the services they’ve bought.

I would find myself in rooms asking (what felt like stupid) questions, such as:

“What does the customer think about this process?”

“How will this decision affect the customer elsewhere in the business? Or our other teammates?”

“In this ____, we’re being contradictory to what we say on (our website, our policy, our onboarding documentation, our support team scripts, et al.)”

Customers were often treated like unknowing contestants on ‘American Gladiators.’ If they didn’t wear a lot of foam padding, expect to be smacked in the head with a javelin and confront a bodybuilder named Viper- well, that was their fault!

It’s been great to see the emergence of ‘customer experience’ and ‘CX’ as terminology we can use. While still imperfect, it’s a way to find the tribe. Those in their roles who, like me, asked about the impact on the customer in every meeting and tip-toed into lots of other people’s functional business because it was important to make things better. MY tribe.

Finding the CX Tribe

This tribe is made up of people who sit in rooms and, regardless of their functional role, advocate for what customers actually feel, think, say, and do as real people. A tribe that understands that real people are the ones who make or break the profitability of our businesses, and if we don’t treat them with respect and hold them in high regard, we lose credibility and potentially long-term success. A tribe of people who remain constantly curious about how changes in our macroeconomy shift how people think and interact with businesses as part of their daily lives. A tribe of people who moonlight as corporate therapists, bringing customer feedback to the table and being met with much more insight into where friction and pain occur internally that impedes evolution. A tribe that is egalitarian in nature, interacting with people from all walks of life, all levels, and all backgrounds. A tribe that is constantly curious, empathetic, and seeks to learn something every day. A tribe that has a breadth of experience that creates flexibility in creating vision, building strategy, and helping lead organizations toward putting the customer at the center of the business for every decision.

Over the last few years, I’ve fully leaned in to discover, uncover, and learn about the multi-faceted discipline of CX and how it’s rapidly changing to help businesses uncover their greatest (and probably only differentiated) asset: experience design.

I’ve been afforded some great opportunities throughout my career through fantastic bosses and organizations who allowed me to explore, experiment, build my case, and champion change around the customer experience. Since my ‘funemployment’ began last September, I’ve been continuing my path and recently completed my CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) certification from CXPA, of which I’m now a member.

Let me tell you – this certification was no joke. You must apply for eligibility to take the exam, so this isn’t a LinkedIn learning course. Then there are the fees, which are standard when joining any established professional association. As many Google searches proved, very little is out there about the test itself, and that’s by design. The best (not free) resource I found was the CCXP Exam Simulator, which allows you to take practice tests and review your scores at the aggregate topic and individual question level to pinpoint study time on your biggest areas of deficiency. Also helpful, I found a recommendation for CCXP flashcards that I went through via the Brainscape app. Shout out to Stephanie Como, wherever she is, for creating this.

This process was helpful to me as a practitioner because it felt like a validation and a barometer of where I could improve in the future. Some things I took away from this:

• Hey! I knew what the hell I was talking about the entire time and was doing the right things in the right order!***
• Damn! This test is asking me about different types of statistical analysis, Lean methodology, PMP, and a host of other things that are not squarely in the world of ‘CX’ but are very important in terms of getting shit done in the real world.

*** The other realization was that I tried to do too much at once. I tried to boil the ocean. This explained my frustration and burnout and probably created more confusion for others than clarity. But I remind myself of the Maya Angelou quote:

Companies Are Short-Sighted And Ignoring Long-Term Experience Plays

The job market right now is pretty wild. While I avoided the 2007-2009 recession professionally, I’m hearing that this is in many ways worse due to a number of factors that are probably better left for professionals to discuss.

The irony is that I see so many companies struggling to understand their profitability, don’t know what people are doing/should be doing, and don’t understand what customers value from them as goods or service providers. CX is meant to be the air traffic control tower in your business that helps align all the work you’re doing to grow, retain, and create loyal customers.

Several factors contribute to the confusion around the importance and value of ‘cx’, ‘customer experience’, or ‘experience design.’ As I mentioned before, the language is still something to overcome. But beyond the surface-level lexicon, we have to really help people understand HOW this work contributes to the business.

You’re dead in the water when you do not connect experience-level metrics back to financials, or at least metrics that your C-suite and board members care about. NPS, to me, is the blandest of insights because it rarely correlates to whether customers keep spending money with you in reality. Asking people what they think is only one facet – you have to correlate that insight with their actual (spending) behavior. How often have you seen an executive or someone in a meeting gloss over when presented with your 100 nickel-and-dime metrics?

No1curr unless we’re talking about money, honey.

Feedback alone, whether quant or qual, is not enough. How many times have I eaten at a terrible restaurant but, because of my midwestern politeness, told the waiter everything was great, walked outside, and said to my husband, “That was shit. Never again.” My feedback score was high, but you never saw repeat business from me.

Second – do not be tempted by perfection, as it is an illusion. Start small, find wins, then scale. As I mentioned before, my problem was scalability. I tried to boil the ocean, do everything at once, and save everyone. Doomed! I was doomed. But now I know better. I had to go through that experience to understand how expansive and intensive it is to lead the charge within an organization. I’d recommend Jeanne Bliss’ book “Chief Customer Officer 2.0” for some very direct steps on approaching a CX (r)evolution so that you don’t lose your mind, feel like you’re Carrie from Homeland season one, and want to quit. Sure, you’ll have those days. But they’ll pass. Stay grounded on small wins and ruthlessly prioritize what’s most important by looking at what has the most impact (see paragraphs above).

Lastly, as a tribe member, you know that experience will be the only thing we can differentiate. How we treat customers is the only thing that has, does, and will matter. (And in life, how we treat people is the only measure of our own decency and humanity, so there’s a macro point of view for free). Price may be a sticking point in time, but it’s a moot point if your strategy isn’t to be the cheapest provider in the market. Focus on creating reliable, consistent experiences that customers can depend upon and crave in a world full of broken promises.

CX Professionals Must Be Great Storytellers

The best way to make this matter for people is through storytelling. Overwhelming people with dashboards and copious metrics only confuses and dilutes the power of what we’re trying to explain – this is what a real person has to navigate when they choose to do business with us. We make it this hard for them, as a customer, to complete this task. And guess what – look at what our employees are doing and where they’re struggling. You’ll get more engagement if you can position your recommendations for change through real customer stories (use video or audio clips from interviews and bring leaders into focus groups, putting them face-to-face with actual people). My biggest recommendation is to spend time helping those in the organization who want your guidance, expertise, and help. Those who see you as someone to supplement and complement their team to get better intelligence on how to improve experiences are the folks you want to work with.

Lastly, as Bliss points out in her book (seriously, read it), if there isn’t alignment among leadership and there isn’t a person within leadership who is the champion of this work, CX will always remain an afterthought. And that perception of a ‘nice-to-have’ will undermine the ability to change.

We’re seeing that play out in today’s job market. It’s unfortunate because I believe the power of CX strategy is to break down the old structures and siloes that businesses have been built upon and move toward a one-company approach that treats the customer’s end-to-end experience as a way to earn the right for long-term growth and success.

If you want to discuss experience-centricity, need a sounding board, and don’t want to be ‘sold’ on anything, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn.