How do you become a customer experience leader?

It helps to design customer "personas" for each applicable segment. Developing personas allows you to be intimately familiar with customer perspectives. You can use Brainstorming - or you can actively research and interview customers to understand their perspectives.

Listen to their needs, gather feedback, and personalize interactions. This builds trust and satisfaction. If you work in customer service at X company, pay attention to customer feedback. If many customers mention they'd like quicker response times, work on improving response speed. This shows you're listening and caring about their needs, which can lead to better customer experiences.

Become a CX leader by understanding customer needs, fostering a customer-centric culture, empowering employees, analyzing data for insights, adapting strategies based on feedback, and continuously innovating to enhance customer satisfaction.

Understanding the DISC behavioural styles also complements all the other tools available to knowing your customers. Being able to identify your customer's DISC style also adds value to the communication process.

The best way to get to know your customers and collect insights you can use to improve your CX, is by using surveys. - Micro surveys at key interaction points throughout the customer journey. Don't just ask "What brought you here today?". Use simple and clickable smiley surveys to collect feedback about the information on your product pages and how well they help the visitor to make a decision. Use micro surveys to ask users about your product recommendations, the filters on your category pages. - Post-X surveys. Post signup, post-purchase, post-service contact. Ask either WHY someone signed up, contact support, or what almost made them not do it.

CX visions and values are great but more often than not there are certain grey areas that are always left unattended. One such is when during the CX journey events arise where regulatory or legal impediments arise. Such CX challenges should not be met with organisational rigidity, but where potential for conflict might arise, especially in areas of regulatory compliance, legal and/or policy conflict, CX should have acceptable work-arounds that do not leave the customer totally unsatisfied, but also not compromising the integrity of the company. Legal frameworks are out in place by authorities to manage operating environments with set standards and procedures. Company's need to also learn how to play within these frameworks

Your CX strategy will largely depend on how well you know your customers and how well you can identify points where i.e. Personalization will ADD value to the customer journey. Should you personalize the category page, or the product page? Or would it add more value to just show a "Click to copy" discount code to your most loyal customers when they return to your website? Unused discount code reminders might be the most valuable for your customers, as they want to get the royal treatment. Also, a good experience stretches way beyond the actual interactions and into content on social media, email, and outside your owned channels.

A CX vision and strategy is about creating a clear picture of the kind of customer experience you want to deliver and how you plan to achieve it. It involves setting goals, understanding customer needs, and outlining the steps to meet those needs effectively, ultimately aiming to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

This particular point all comes down to employee engagement so my advice here is pretty simple: get to know your internal audience. If you're a CX leader, at some point along the way you've learned what it means to better understand the customer, the challenges they face and their aspirations for the future. Take the perspective you've gleaned from CX and reposition that lens onto your internal audience. Uncover the challenges they're facing that are actually barriers to engagement with your vision and strategy, (e.g. PowerPoint & the "white noise" of corporate communications). Meet internal audiences where they are, on their terms and break through in ways that are more relevant and meaningful to their day-to-day rather than your own.

At the company I work for, we develop a customer-centric culture in several ways, one of which is through a program called “PEXX” (Customer Experience Excellence Program). In the program, there are general and specific customer experience objectives, with key KPIs, on-site assessments, employee recognition, and the multiplication of best practices.

CX should be an ongoing endeavour, that aims allow ease of interaction with an organisations products and services. The smoother and enjoyable the journey, the greater the propensity to repeat and refer a company's services. FAQs should be ingrained in staff psyche's, and the solutions on their finger tips. There shouldn't be ambiguity in the escalation matrix of the company and all should be free to hold seniors accountable in helping resolve CX challenges. Back office support are the critical cog that ensures seamless CX journey's and should therefore understand their role in the CX journey. This is where the ball is usually dropped where teams do not fully appreciate their role and contribution.

To build a customer-centric culture: 🌟 Leadership Commitment: Top-level management's dedication to customer satisfaction. 🔍 Customer Understanding: Ensuring employees know customer needs and preferences. 🎓 Training: Providing staff with great customer service training. 📢 Feedback Loop: Gathering and acting on customer opinions. 🤝 Empower Employees: Giving staff authority to benefit customers. 🏆 Reward Customer-Centric Behavior: Recognizing and rewarding customer-focused employees. 🔄 Continuous Improvement: Cultivating a culture of ongoing process enhancement. 🗨️ Communication: Keeping all informed about customer-centric goals and progress. These steps foster a culture focused on delivering an excellent customer experience.

Be honest about the simplicity of your business processes. Fixes won’t happen overnight or in silos. If marketing entices with, “simple, easy experiences,” but: ✖️Your website doesn’t work ✖️Content is confusing ✖️Customers wait too long ✖️Policies make customers’ lives harder Then you’re not building a CX promise based on ease.

CX leaders have a broad responsibility to understand the business they represent. Even if you don't implement new technology or new practices, you need to know what is happening with tools, privacy laws, project management techniques, business risk, and the global business landscape so that you can bring value to the C-suite.

With technology and innovation in particular, it's absolutely critical in CX to strike a balance between what your company can do and what your company should do. There will always be plenty of "can" for a company to implement. It's the CX leader's responsibility to ensure a voice for "should" is ever present and ever mindful of what matters most to the customer.

What we've found is that revenue per session is a very valuable metric when it comes to CX. Some tactics might lower the Average order value, but increase the customer lifetime value over time because it makes customers stick around longer. Lifetime value is a lagging metric, but revenue per session is more about the immediate impact. And conversion rate does not always tell the full story since conversion rates can be slightly down but revenue per session UP. As we all know, management cares about both the long-term and short-term results and they're equally important when demonstrating the value of your CX improvements.

In our company, we do strategic CX communication management. Learnings, whether they were successful or not, are shared with other teams, in success stories, and in award cases. We also manage CX content to share best practices and results with employees and the CX communities.

Protect your team CX team members must have a daily motivation to improve the customer experience. The routine is not easy, your team must point out errors in other areas and people, talk about issues that are often no longer noticed and highlight the progress of actions, even if there is no progress. For your team to be successful in their activities, empower them, show that they will be protected by you in their activities. Take the focus and exclusive responsibility away from your team in delivering the experience, this is also the responsibility of the entire company. Show the voice of the customer, use their testimonials and, if possible, bring them to speak to the company.

Acquire knowledge This is essential for growth in any activity, to stand out in CX it is necessary to go deeper into this business discipline. Search for reliable sources about CX, such as: Forrester, Bain Company, CXPA and scientific articles. There are good books that can help you format strategic thinking - Outside In and Effortless Experience. Participate in meetups and see what other leaders are doing in the market, this can be via Podcast, Live and events. We have a lot of digital contents and more. Furthermore, you will be able to analyze your actions, carry out mentoring and benchmarks, this will give you a lot of empowerment to lead CX actions.

It doesn’t happen in just a few steps unfortunately but a good way to start is to see the business from the customer perspective.

talk to customers talk to sales rep talk to frontlines Don't just sit in the office, reading the data, and think you know the customers

What gets overlook because it's not the scope of CX especially in B2B is the buyer experience (BX) BX + CX = E2EX (End-to-end experience) So widen your scope because true end-to-end experience covers all spectrum of the journey from A (strangers) to Z (churned customers).