I recently came across with Kerry Bodine’s blog post WHICH COMES FIRST: BIG BUSINESS DECISIONS –OR– CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE? Her key point is: ‘Customer experience isn’t something else you do—it’s how you do everything.’ CX is not an add-on, it doesn’t work in a vacuum – it should be an input to all business decisions.
In other words, CX is a holistic achievement that multiple teams and individuals contribute to. It is a core item on everybody’s agenda. To make this possible, the company needs to ensure that related competences are in place.
The following list shows some essential CX competences.
- What the concept ‘customer experience’ means
- What a great customer experience consists of, what the attributes are
- What the company’s CX vision and strategy are
- What tools there are for developing customer experience (e.g. customer journey mapping)
- What customer metrics exist, what metrics the company has decided to use
- What customer data is available and how to obtain it
- What ready-made analyses/reports are available
- How the company uses customer insights
- What top projects are ongoing to improve customer experience
- Success stories of cases where CX improvements were made
- How the company communicates its CX activities and achievements
The questions can be utilized as input to discussions at team level (‘what’s in it for us?’), or the topics can be embedded into training programs or the company’s internal communications – or they can form a development area for a CX transformation program. In ideal cases, CX competence development is designed so that it links as closely as possible to the employees’ own work and motivates people to take it as input to their own tasks.
