Nick Glimsdahl, director of Contact Center Solutions, VDS, got into customer experience the usual way—accidentally. With years of experience in everything from website design to marketing to customer service, Nick had always prided himself on resolving and refining the customer experience, even before he knew the term, much less its legitimacy as a profession.
He recalls a story by a conference speaker that resonated deeply. He was at an event listening to a manager from LEGO tell the story of how the toy company created an acronym now deeply embedded in its much-admired culture. After writing descriptors on a white board wall, the group found that four captured the group’s intent: Fun, Reliable, Knowledgeable, and Expert—FRKE (pronounced “freaky”).
To Nick, these traits show why CX pros need to “own your organization. Don't be ‘industry standard’--be you! Companies worry too much about benchmarking themselves against others instead of focusing on what the value is that they're bringing to their customers that's really going to drive their growth.”
Is Your CX Strategy Like Chalk?
Nick thinks the desire to measure CX is there, but that organizations face challenges when it is time to execute.
“The biggest thing is that, although organizations focus on CX, they don't necessarily measure CX,” because they don’t know how, aren’t sure how to define it, or may have never done it before, says Nick, who—being a Columbus, Ohio, resident—immediately turns to a LeBron James metaphor to clarify his comments.
As Nick explains, LeBron sometimes uses chalk on the sidelines and throws some up in the air before walking onto the basketball court with his teammates. Then they get down to the business of executing a ferocious strategy to win, appropriately sending their fans into delirium.
However, many C-suite corporate leaders are not at all like LeBron. Instead, they yell, “We need a CX strategy!” and throw that chalk—e.g., bits of data or goals of little substance--into the air with no one (much less a team) assigned to transform it into a customer experience of champions.
To make matters worse, companies “sometimes are so focused on the customer experience that they're not paying attention to their employee experience, the people on the same journey who are part of the same process,” Nick continues. “… If you're not treating your employees well, so they have the right career growth or maybe even just the right technology, your customers are going to feel that…. [Companies need to] take a holistic view of the whole experience.”
Tips for New Kids on the (CX) Block
One primary stress for CX professionals—especially those early in their careers--is working in companies that provide them with the right tool set but measure them on stuff that's Nick calls “silly and [that] isn't going to drive customer and employee engagement.”
Asked for one piece of wisdom for early-career CX workers, Nick generously gives seven:
- Don't get frustrated. “I've seen people fail and succeed in that tipping point between ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I getting measured on it?’ and ‘Where do I go next?’” he says.
- Feel the love—you’re not alone. “CX can be lonely if you're in a big organization, so surround yourself with other customer experience professionals,” says Nick, who co-leads the Columbus, Ohio, CXPA network. “…There are so many people who come up to me and say, ‘Man, before I met you or met CXPA and started going to these events, I almost quit customer experience, because all I was doing was Googling something, and [the search] immediately went to an advertisement, so I had nowhere to go.”
- Understand what it means to be successful in your role. “You're trying to knock down silos and make sure the customer’s voice gets heard, but if the organization is not mature [about CX] or trying to understand it, that can feel pretty depressing,” he sympathizes, “so … seek out people who are either in your position or have been in your position.”
- Find champions in your company willing to educate colleagues about CX . Nick suggests doing some mini-sessions or other small-group trainings around customer and employee experience. Passing along blog posts, articles, and other helpful materials gets everyone to “start spreading the word on customer experience,” he notes.
- Understand that CX maturity is all over the board, regardless of company size. “It doesn't matter if you're a Fortune 100 company or a company of 10,000,” says Nick, “everybody has a different customer experience maturity, so understand where you're at. Some Fortune 500 companies are still novices when it comes to employee and customer experience.
“They may talk a good game, but if you get past the first couple of questions, they're very, very thin--maybe an inch wide and a mile long! And then there are some 100-person companies that are killing it on customer experience--you can see that in their bottom line, too, because they have a laser focus on the customer.”
- Bring in help to break down barriers preventing your awesomeness. “It's not going to happen overnight,” Nick warns. “There are going to be some bumps in the road” to [excelling in the CX field]. He suggests sitting down with a team of people who may not have the same strengths as you but who can understand your weaknesses and collaborate.
- Enjoy the ride! “If you don't surround yourself with the right people or the right organization like CXPA, and you don't know how to measure [CX] and don't enjoy the journey or focus on what's most important, you're either going to fail, or it's going to be miserable, and you’ll want to go back to your status quo,” Nick concludes.
And status quo is definitely not a goal of LeBron-level CX pros.