Five CX Competencies Transform Your Experience

The customer experience that gains the most confidence with customers is to get the basics right. These five CX competencies work in tandem to ‘earn the right’ to customer growth:

• Connect to business growth
• Shift attitudes from chasing the score to caring about and improving customer lives to earn the right to growth.
• Deliver a connected story that get leaders to focus on the important moments (versus silos picking things that they think will give them ‘lift’ on survey scores)
• Demystify the role of the Chief Customer Officer. The role becomes clear as facilitator that unites leaders to make decisions to improve customers’ lives and drive growth.

Only after you established a reliable experience and gained the confidence of your customers, can you move to deepen a personal relationship.

#1. Customers as Assets

Your focus is to get leaders to make a defining performance metric – the growth or loss of your customer base. The purpose is to shift to a simple understanding – knowing what customers actually did to impact business growth (or loss) versus survey results that report what they might do.

• Know the growth or loss of your customers.
• Care about the “why?”

Read More: Customers as Assets
Where Are You Now in Managing Customers as Assets?

 #2. Align Around Experience

CX Competency 2 gives leaders a stage by stage customer journey framework for guiding the work of the organization. This means understanding of the entire customer journey versus the silo-based internal processes that are frequently called “journeys” (such as the sales process, marketing acquisition process, etc.).

• Drive accountability to the stages as customers experience them, not down your silos.
• Identify priorities to drive united focus.

Read More: Align Operations Around Experience Design
Move From Silo Based Actions to Customer Journey Based Actions
Have You Removed the Inhibitors to Your CX Success?

#3. Customer Listening

CX Competency 3 unites your organization to build a ‘one company’ listening system guided by the customer journey framework that tells the story of your customers’ experience.

The role of the Chief Customer Officer is to engage leaders and the organization to want to be a part of ‘one company’ story telling to unite decision-making and drive cross-company focus and action. That’s why I’ve coined this competency as building a customer ‘listening path.’

• Know and care about real time emerging issues
• Map issues to the customer journey.
• Unite how you identify and act on issues/opportunities.

Read More: Customer Listening

 

4. Proactive Experience Reliability & Innovation

CX Competency 4 builds out your “Revenue Erosion Early Warning System.” Leaders need to care about how employees are performing in the processes that impact the priority moments in your customers’ journey. These are critical points that impact a customer decision to stay, leave, buy more or recommend you to others.

• Proactively manage key cross-company process/KPI metrics– to hold yourselves accountable to deliver experience reliability.
• Drive on-going action on emerging issues before customers tell you.

Read More: Customer Experience Reliability
Is it a Reliable Experience or Experience Breakdown?
Gain Reliability with Accountability
How to Bring the Organization Together to Think “Experience”

 #5. Leadership, Accountability & Culture

This is your “prove it to me” competency.  Leadership proves their commitment to customer-driven growth with actions and choices. To emulate culture, people need examples. They need proof.

• Unite your actions by clarity of purpose.
• Utilize the customer room to drive accountability.
• Give people permission and enable them to deliver customer experience reliability.

Read More: Leadership and Customer Experience Culture
Customer Leaders Must Have Guts
Keep Your Focus Across the Silos
Involve Executives in the Customer Loss Review
Customer Hand-offs Requires Collaboration

CX competencies are your growth engine

The five CX competencies are not distinct ‘work streams.’  Today, surveys come out and we react to them. Research is done and we react. Everything is a distinct project without an overarching framework. Work streams begin without line of sight to each other.

These CX competencies are built with a clear connection to one another.  Over time you have a repeatable and deliberate customer growth engine.  Your work as the Chief Customer Officer is to engage the organization to phase the growth engine build out so that it sticks.

Conclusion

The power of these five CX competencies is how they connect the customer experience work:

1. The five CX competencies establish an engine for driving customer growth.
2. The Chief Customer Officer facilitates the construct of the engine, engaging leaders and employees throughout the company.
3. The engine enables one-company customer growth behavior and actions.
4. Without this united engine, activities go back to being ruled by squeaky wheel issues, executive visit one-off action items and silo-by-silo priorities.