As your Customer Experience Consultant, in addition to my passion for delivering an exceptional experience customer I am fluent in the six primary competencies that are required knowledge for a customer experience professional.
Gerry Criscenzo, President, Founder, Advanced Service Knowledge
1. Customer-Centric Culture
- Drive employee engagement and involvement — from the front lines to the executive suite
- Develop and deliver ongoing CX interaction training to employees
- Develop communication strategies and tactics to share the importance of CX with employees, customers, and the company
- Collect and share stories of CX excellence to your company’s team to foster engagement
My Knowledge Includes:
- Best practices for cultivating a customer-focused culture
- Internal and external marketing, promotion, and communications
- Employee hiring, training, and coaching
- Employee engagement strategies
- Reward and recognition strategies
Skills and Abilities:
- Problem solving skills
- Relationship building skills
- Ability to coordinate diverse resources to create value
- Ability to engage “hearts and minds” of an organization across employee groups
- Ability to align employee behavior with customer-focused culture
2. Organizational Adoption & Accountability
- Align business goals with customer-focused culture
- Maintain a dedicated list of top customer experience improvements, including which senior executive is accountable for resolution
- Embed customer experience impact as a criterion for all business and investment decisions
- Introduce new processes and tools to improve customer experience
- Work across departments and organizations to improve customer experience
- Regularly review CX metrics and feedback at all levels of the organization
My Knowledge Includes:
- Project management principles
- Collaboration and relationship management practices
- Leadership and change management
- Prioritization process
- Process management
Skills and Abilities:
- Ability to communicate the importance of customer experience and corresponding strategy
- Ability to recommend initiatives based on customer experience data
- Ability to report CX data to different audiences in an understandable manner
- Ability to plan, implement, and manage change
- Ability to lead cross-functional efforts
- Collaboration, influencing, and relationship skills
3. VOC, Customer Insight & Understanding
- Align business goals with customer-focused culture
- Maintain a dedicated list of top customer experience improvements, including which senior executive is accountable for resolution
- Embed customer experience impact as a criterion for all business and investment decisions
- Introduce new processes and tools to improve customer experience
- Work across departments and organizations to improve customer experience
- Regularly review CX metrics and feedback at all levels of the organization
My Knowledge Includes:
- Different approaches to measuring customer experience (e.g. NPS, CSAT, CSI, etc.)
- Qualitative and quantitative research methods
- VOC analytical tools and methodologies
- Touch-point mapping
Skills and Abilities:
- Ability to conduct root cause analysis
- Ability to conduct predictive analysis
- Ability to analyze and redesign processes
4. Experience Design & Improvement
- Establish and follow a well-defined design process each time an experience is created or changed
- Use customer insights to define and prioritize experience requirements and opportunities for improvement
- Use journey mapping to improve most relevant moments of truth
- Assess, document, track, and report resolution of experience gaps across touch points
- Identify interdependencies across people, process and technology that impact design of the customer experience
- Use iterative ideation and prototyping (e.g., design thinking) to engage customers and employees in the co-creation of enhanced or innovative experiences
My Knowledge Includes:
- Design thinking and customer co-creation approaches
- Process improvement methodologies and discipline
- Customer journey mapping and touch-point analysis
Skills and Abilities:
- Ability to identify key moments of truth affecting customer perceptions
- Ability to conduct experience gap analysis and prioritize recommended improvements
- Ability to drive customer centered design and innovation
- Ability to accurately map and depict customer touch points
- Ability to drive action and execution of key CX improvements
5. Metrics, Measurement & ROI
- Identify key CX metrics for tracking experience quality, satisfaction, and loyalty
- Develop framework and linkage of improved experiences to business outcomes (growth, attrition, profitability, etc.)
- Develop infrastructure and mechanisms to capture CX data (surveys, operational data, customer behavior, word of mouth, financial performance, etc.)
- Analyze and interpret results to derive customer insights and performance trends
- Report results, insights, and recommended actions to improve
My Knowledge Includes:
- Net Promoter Score and methodology
- Impact of experience changes on loyalty and business performance across customer groups
- Relationship and financial metrics (cross-sell, product penetration, etc.)
- Customer experience management dashboards
- CX data mining and analysis
- Experience measurement and research methodologies
- Strategies to communicate metrics and ROI with employee and stakeholder groups
Skills and Abilities:
- Ability to create measurement strategy in support of broader CX strategy
- Ability to quantify business value and ROI of investing in customer experience
- Ability to illustrate ROI of CX investments
- Ability to assess effectiveness of metrics platform design
- Ability to translate data into clear communication of results, progress and actions
- Ability to drive executive support and engagement in CX metrics and results
6. Customer Experience Strategy
- Define a customer experience strategy that describes the intended customer experience, its linkage to overall corporate objectives, and its alignment with the organization’s brand values and attributes
- Develop experience principles and specific employee behaviors and interactions that reflect brand values and organizational mission
- Articulate the operating plan, investments, and tactics for programmatic components of the CX strategy
- Communicate and engage employees at all levels of the organization in the elements of the CX strategy
My Knowledge Includes:
- Development of “branded” customer experiences
- Strategy and planning for cross-business-unit efforts to support the organization’s CX strategy
- CX best practices across industries
- Internal marketing and communications
- Associate engagement
- Business strategy frameworks and planning
Skills and Abilities:
- Ability to translate corporate strategy into well-defined customer experience strategies and programmatic efforts
- Ability to engage executive suite in CX strategy design and execution
- Ability to take branded experience strategy and engage all functional business areas (product, marketing, operations, etc.) in creation of action plans
- Ability to clearly communicate the importance of the customer experience strategy to deliver the organization’s business goals