Today, if a professional wants to specialize in Customer Experience and obtain an international certification as a specialist and be considered a CCXP – Certified Customer Experience Professional, he/she will need to master the 06 Disciplines of Customer Experience: Strategy, Customer Understanding, Design, Measurement, Governance and Culture.
Who takes the exam is an international association of Customer Experience professionals known as CXPA – Customer Experience Professionals Association (www.cxpa.org) and if you want to access more information about the exam, the link is www.ccxp.org
1– Strategy
Strategy is the game plan. It’s a set of practices to elaborate a customer experience strategy, aligning them with the company’s overall strategy and brand attributes; while at the same time sharing that strategy with employees to guide decision-making and prioritization across the organization. this strategy with the overall strategy of the company and also with the attributes of the brand. And, finally, share the customer experience strategy with all employees; developing campaigns, training etc.
2 – Customer Understanding
This discipline focuses on truly getting to know customers. It involves a set of practices that creates a consistent understanding of who the customers are, what they want and how they perceive the interactions they have with their company today.
Some practices:
- Ask for feedback is a constant exercise of listening to clients about their experiences with the company, which can be done through surveys or interviews. It’s a practice that extends through the relationship centers, emails and social medias;
- Gather information from employees about their experiences with customers and their role in delivering customer experience;
- Conduct observational research studies with clients in the natural environment;
- Analyze customer insights, extracted through research techniques, to identify key points of customer pain and opportunities;
- Document customer understanding, so that it’s easy for the employees to understand and use the materials. This involves personas (fictitious representation of your real client) and mapping the client’s journey as stronger examples;
- Share customer knowledge with all employees, distributing documents, conducting training etc.
3 – Design
Design is to draw the process whenever a new experience is introduced or an existing experience is changed significantly. In this discipline, the design thinking service’s branch plays a key role because it has dozens of tools that helps to design in detail and technique the best projected experience. The mapping of the journey, in-depth interview, map of stakeholders etc., are applicable tools at this stage.
The answer lies in the perfect design of the processes, in which not only one person do it well, but everyone performs correctly, giving unity, standardization, team engagement and, consequently, a better experience for the client.
As the authors of Outside In teaches: “Practices in the design discipline helps organizations to imagine and then implement customer interactions, meet or exceed their needs. It covers the complex systems of people, products, interfaces, services and spaces that your customers find in retail locations, over the phone, through digital media, such as internet pages and cellphone apps.”
4– Measurement
That old saying fits here: “What is not measured is not improved”; and experience must be measured for improvement.
The Experience Metrics discipline is a set of practices that enable organizations to quantify customer experience quality consistently across the enterprise and provide interactive information to employees and partners”, teaches the authors of Outside In.
Some steps that facilitate the measurement of the experience:
- Define a quality structure of the customer experience that aligns with how customers judge what a consistent experience is. For example, what is the tolerable waiting time in a cash queue? What is the acceptable timeframe for the delivery of a product? What is the acceptable timeframe for the repairing of a product in the technical assistance?
- Define subsets of customer experience metrics that shows how each group, role, and individual in the organization contribute to the quality of the customer experience;
- Measure how clients perceive their experience with the organization, based on the criteria in the quality structure of the customer experience;
- Analyze customer experience metrics to determine differences in the quality of experience between key customer segments (purchase of a product and procurement of services) or aspects of the experience (team friendship);
- Model the relationship between quality drivers of the customer experience (speed and accuracy), consumer perceptions about their experiences (easy and reliable), and business results (sales and evited calls to the customer service center);
- Share metrics and customer experience templates with all employees (distribute reports, use dashboards and conduct training sessions).
5 – Governance
Governance defines a consistent set of customer experience standards throughout the organization.
Some observations involving the governance discipline:
- Governance has a strong link with the customer experience strategy as a criterion for evaluating investment prioritization decisions;
- The impact on customer experience is important as a criterion for business decisions about policies, processes, technology and communications;
- It’s worth keep a dedicated roll of projects to improve the customer experience;
- Review customer experience program statusand metrics regularly, to monitor progress towards business objectives, adjusting tactics or resource allocations, if necessary;
- Assign specific customer experience management tasks to employees as a requirement of their positions;
- Evaluate employee performance against customer experience metrics;
- Facilitate coordination between groups that share responsibility for a particular experience;
- Whenever a change is approved for a policy, business process, product, technology or other system that affects the customer experience, restructure your experience to reflect the change.
6 – Culture
If you are a leader, culture is what they tell you about when you leave the room. Culture is the way we do things around here.
The culture discipline consists of practices that create a system of shared values and behaviors that encourage employees to offer a great customer experience.
The practices in the culture discipline fall into three categories: hiring, socialization and rewards.
- The Hiring practices selects candidates with customer-centric values and the specific skills needed to meet the company’s experience strategy. The condition is that the candidate is committed to helping clients. Placing the magnifying glass on the candidate’s behavioral issues can generate more results, because it’s easier to teach someone a skill than to change their basic beliefs and personalities. In a nutshell: always hire people who enjoy, who have the pleasure of serving;
- The Socialization practices involves the importance of communicating customer experience to employees, customers and all other stakeholders. Train new and existing employees in the skills they need to deliver the best experience;
- The Rewards practices involve formal rewards (bonuses and promotions) and the use of prizes and informal celebrations to highlight customer-centered behavior.
Credits: The research source for this article was based on the book Outside In – The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine
ABDULKADİR ERCAN DEMİRTAŞ 