Kay Lynn Hendrix, CCXP, believes that the ability to ask good questions is essential for any CX professional.
As Director, Customer Experience at Dell EMC, Hendrix brings that inquisitive mindset to her team, which focuses on the experience of customers who purchase servers from the company.
“I have three parts to my team,” Hendrix says, “a research section that conducts big competitive studies like NPS and all of those traditional kinds of things. And then we have an analytics piece that takes all those customer insights and takes our operational data and says, ‘how do we tie those things together? What are we doing operationally, and how does that tie to what our customers are saying about where those gaps are?’ We take all that information and then we go activate on it, and we do that through our project management arm.”
As Hendrix sees it, CX professionals must approach their customers’ challenges—and their colleagues—with relentless curiosity. “Whether you are talking to a customer to understand what they need, or you are talking to an employee to help drive change, or you are talking to an executive to try to get your project funded or move forward, the ability to ask questions is a really good skill set in this job,” she says. “It’s the concept of, ‘tell me more, tell me more.’ And I think that that is a skill that has really helped me drive better understanding. And I think if you have better understanding of where customers and people are coming from, you can drive more progress.”
To read my full conversation with Kay Lynn, where we discuss the role CX leaders play in change management, creative solutions for calculating the ROI of CX initiatives, and much more, head to the member resources section.