What qualities do we need as Customer Experience Professionals?

By Amanda Riches | Senior Director EMEA Consulting | 5 min read

Clare’s question to me during the podcast “What are your top 3 pieces of advice for women in Customer Experience (CX)?” stimulated a whole chain of thinking about the attributes or behaviours we need as CX professionals.  Putting our customers at the heart of our strategies embodies a deliberate path to excellence, being relentless in our search for actionable insight, continuous improvement and innovation, intentionally designing our customer experiences, and then developing our people, products and processes to deliver that experience.

As CX Professionals, we are at the centre of change, so what qualities do we need? 

Trust our judgement and be bold

As mentioned to Clare, I remember earlier in my career being told by an Executive that he wished I would just trust my judgement more and to not always analyse every single fact and figure to the enth degree.  I’m a huge believer in data-driven decisions, but we must not get lost in data.  Instead we should have confidence in our recommendations, share them with clarity and conviction (after all we have done our analysis) and engage our organisations to take action, particularly if we are to adapt as fast as the world around us is changing right now: to test innovations and improvements, to measure and learn, to iterate our strategies, and to take more action.  If there is something we don’t know yet, then we should also have the confidence to admit that in order to build trust with our stakeholders. 

In CX, we have to be bold, be prepared to fail even, to drive change.  For all of us, but particularly as women in CX, we should not be afraid to be less than perfect or indeed fail (safely in these times of COVID of course).  A failure is only really a failure if we do not learn from it.

Be human

Central to driving CX is changing the behaviour of people within an organisation.  Organisations do not change, people do.  We need to listen to our business stakeholders and colleagues, really understand the business and the problems from their perspectives, anticipate the common objections and resistance they might have, and then tailor our messages based on a strong sense of our different audiences’ WIIFM (What’s In It For Me).  Humans are motivated by stories, about how it will help them, or individual CX acts of kindness, or examples of business impact.  Communicating how one business unit saved thousands of call centre hours by implementing SMS claim status updates helped a leading global insurer energise other markets to find similar impactful improvements.  We need to be storytellers and capture our stakeholders' attention by bringing insights that tell a compelling story and provide them with a reason to act.

Results orientated

We must strive for results and focus on how we can improve business performance.  Whilst we need to focus on  the people element of change, such as gaining buy-in from others and exploring potential ideas and solutions with them, we must always do this in conjunction with a relentless focus on business outcomes.  Whilst we do not need to quantify the impact of all actions (some are simply no-brainers), we should identify what potential business outcome our identified improvements or actions can drive, estimate the potential operational, financial, employee and customer impact of these actions with a clear hypothesis, evaluate initiatives in a controlled way, then roll out these out at scale for maximum benefit.

 Activate others

Too often I see customer programmes or strategies get stuck with the core CX team or one or two others analysing results, themes, and driving action.  We will not drive change from what we centrally control – we have to engage and enable the whole organisation.  Building our cross functional team is critical.  This shouldn’t be just operational, call centre, or sales champions.  We need to enable our wider teams, e.g. HR, IT, Finance, Legal, Buying, Marketing etc. too, and set expectations with them about how they contribute to CX.  At the hub, we are facilitators, influencers and coaches, and we track and monitor progress and impact of improvement initiatives.

Build resilience

Finally, there will always be ups and downs but, as CX Professionals, we have to build our resilience because we’re often trying to drive change and some people just do not like change.  To actively build resilience, we should embrace our individual strengths, foster strong support networks, and embrace a growth mindset. 

Knowing and leaning on your strengths makes it easier to push through challenges because you know what you’re good at.  Social support and strong relationships also help us to manage through adversity, whether in or out of work.  When a setback occurs, I find sometimes the simplest but most productive thing I can do is to have a quick conversation with a close colleague to get it off my chest or brainstorm a solution.  We also need to be able to appreciate challenges and setbacks as an opportunity to learn and thrive.  I am really lucky that at Medallia we embrace a growth mindset - where it is perceived that we can grow and develop our skills and knowledge as opposed to having a fixed mindset where intelligence is static and inherent (Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, 2006).  A growth mindset gives us freedom to try new things and to learn what goes right and wrong.  Ultimately, when we experience resistance to change or setbacks in what we do, it's up to us to find out what those lessons are as individuals and act on them.

These musings are my own and a starting point for discussion.  I would love to hear more about the qualities you believe we need as CX Professionals.

Bio

Amanda has almost 20 years experience driving change in large multi-sector organisations and she was recently named the top CX professional in the UK by the CX Magazine.

Previously Head of Quality & Guest Insight at Whitbread, Amanda established the successful service formula that sits behind Premier Inn, the award-winning leading hotel chain. 

Now Senior Director of Professional Services at Medallia, she leads CX and EX Consulting across EMEA, helping clients operationalise the voice of their customers, employees and citizens, engaging senior and frontline teams to drive action and commercial impact

Outside of work Amanda is a keen cyclist and regularly speaks and raises funds in aid of Maggie’s Centres, who provide free practical and emotional support for people living with cancer.