Earning €70k a year, getting praised for company success, and reading through the positive reviews and customer feedback all day long sounds great. But being a CX Director is not this easy – if it were everyone would be doing it.
To truly be a good CX Director, you not only have the knowledge, skills and experience, but most of all, you must have the passion for it.
No passion = No total commitment = No results = No company progress
So, if you are thinking of CX as a career, or you already are a CX Director or Consultant, here is a checklist to see if you are in the right position. If not, perhaps another career would be better.
A few weeks ago we published an article explaining How To Be A Good Leader. To be a good leader you need Emotional Intelligence (EQ) to manage your own emotions well and lead by example.
A CX Director, who is also a good leader, with high EQ will be able to easily put themselves into the customer’s shoes. Customer centricity is the most critical aspect of Customer Experience. If you are able to harness the power of empathy and include it in every decision then designing a CX Strategy should be easy.
As Andres Phillips says, “No two customers are the same, so CX professionals should be adept at addressing a variety of customer emotions — including delight, frustration and anger.”
Understanding emotions through our CX Emotional Framework is a key element in our Professional Diploma in CX course. The framework iis made up of 6 emotional drivers that you can use to understand and analyse customer emotions. The ‘I Trust You’ emotional driver is the most important one as trust is the foundation of any relationship. The ‘You Know Me’ emotional driver is the most impactful. Today all customers want a unique experience ‘custom made’ for their specific needs. By harnessing the power of personalisation you can show your customers that you really know them and make them feel special.
The other factors include ‘You Make it Easy’, ‘You Get Me’, ‘You Deliver On Your Promise’ and ‘You Fix Things’. By using our framework to build your CX strategies you will ensure that you are always keeping your customers and their emotions at the forefront of all your decisions.
The Happiness Index is a great example of a company that utilised our CX Framework to analyse their customers’ feelings about their business and create a tangible and easy-to-follow strategy to improve their CX and grow their business.
See the Case Study here: Using TCXA Framework to Understand Customer Emotions Alongside NPS & CSAT
Sounds counterintuitive? Well, think about it … following up from the Emotional Intelligence – if you have strong empathy for your customers and are able to put yourself in their shoes, then you should know that customers’ expectations are constantly rising.
Customers’ decisions are influenced by their experiences with every other company (this includes even those who are not your direct competitors).
Read More: Your Company Is Compared to Everyone
To keep ahead of your customer’s expectations and needs you should never be satisfied with the way your CX Strategy is running.
Of course, you can celebrate the wins and recognise great CX initiatives, however, CX is a discipline in which you will always have something to improve.
Even if all your NPS and CSAT are skyrocketing consistently, you need to always keep in mind that in one month’s time, your customers’ needs may have changed and you will need to adapt to them.
This is where your passion for CX will really shine – it’s the ‘secret sauce’ to all successful CX initiatives. In our Professional Diploma, we provide many case studies based on real-world examples of how other businesses have successfully implemented their CX Strategies. These aim not only to educate but also inspire you to never settle and always look for new solutions and ways to improve your customer’s experience.
As mentioned at the beginning, the most important aspect of CX is customer-centricity. You always need to have your customers at the centre of all decisions. This is to ensure that you are designing a solution or a strategy that will directly improve their experience, and deliver on their expectations.
In order to do this you always need to look back and analyse customer feedback. This means not only the metrics like NPS or CSAT. This means reading their feedback and social media comments. In CX qualitative data can fill in the gaps that quantitative data is missing.
Remember: While quantitative data can show you the overall picture of the situation, qualitative data will provide context and answer the question ‘Why?’ are the metrics like this and give you clues as to where and what needs improvement.
As well as gathering data from the customers, it’s vital that you take into account the employee feedback – especially the ones who work directly with your customers.
As mentioned above, you can use our CX Framework to gather clear and more insightful qualitative data. Alongside these insights, you should use metrics like NPS, CSAT, Net Easy, Customer Churn Rate or Repeat Purchase Rate to really get the full picture of your customer’s feelings. We go into much greater detail on each of these Metrics in our Professional Diploma course, however, the most important thing to remember is that you can just choose one and focus on it – one metric alone will never provide you with a clear picture of your business current state.
CX is a long-term initiative. If you are impatient, perhaps this isn’t the field for you.
Sure you can get some quick wins after some minor changes, team training or small projects, but if you want CX to become your main business growth strategy (which is what every business should be striving for) – You will need to be able to have patience, perseverance and long-term strategic outlook.
Usually, you can see the results of your CX Strategy initiatives within a year. But after 10 years the profits and the results will really be seen in the company’s development.
This is why, if you’re the type of person who needs to see results ASAP – you might want to look elsewhere for a profession.
On top of this, you must be ready to fight hard and use the power of persuasion to get the CEO Buy-In. One of the biggest challenges CX Directors face is the lack of leadership support.
In our Professional Diploma course, we discuss the strategies behind CEO Buy-In and how to get investment for your CX Strategy. Key to this is proving your return on investment (ROI) to senior management and how your CX strategies will both make and save the company money – when it comes to the CEO, demonstrating increased profitability is extremely important.
In almost every job you will need communication and relationship building skills. However, while in other positions probably the worst that could happen if you don’t have them, is that you will be marked as the awkward shy introvert, in CX you will not accomplish anything.
Harsh, yes, but that’s the truth.
As a CX Director, you will need to communicate and collaborate with every department in your organization. You will be the one that will pass information on from one team to another and you will need to ensure that all tasks are well understood by the respective teams.
If you don’t build a good rapport with Managers and Team leaders and those responsible for delivering the projects and customer solutions, your strategies (no matter how good and innovative) will fail.
Communication of project ideas and assigning tasks go hand in hand with listening skills. You need to be able to listen to your team members to ensure all departments are represented in your decisions.
Read more: Need a career upgrade? Why not Customer Experience?
Last but definitely not least, you need to be able to manage your projects. This last one includes all the above points.
Starting with having a high EQ and great communication skills to being able to gather data effectively and analyse it to monitor progress. You should be comfortable with and able to delegate tasks to respective team members. This is not a position where you do everything by yourself.
However, at the same time, it can be very lonely. It is very common for CX Managers and directors to not have a dedicated team – especially if the organisation’s CX is in its infancy. This is why when you become a learner in our course you will have access to a community group of all our learners and graduates where you can brainstorm ideas and connect with other like-minded CX Professionals.
So, do you think you have what it takes to be a CX Director or Manager? Enrol in our Professional Diploma today and gain a world-recognised CX Qualification that will give you the skills, knowledge and authority to deliver great CX initiatives.
