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Nothing is Constant but Change – Top 3 CX Observations for 2019

By Lesley Lykins posted 01-03-2019 11:25 AM

  




One of my favorite movies in my younger days was “While You Were Sleeping” starring Sandra Bullock. I absolutely adore Sandra Bullock and must have watched it repeatedly.

This holiday season as I return from a military deployment that took me away most of the year, I find myself “waking up” and just want to say to each of you, “Wow you’ve been busy while I was away!

When describing what it feels like to be a military reservist returning to civilian life following a deployment to a war zone, I usually borrow this analogy from a friend of mine.

You know when you’re sitting with a group of friends watching a really good movie, and just as the action and plot start to thicken you get called away.  You come back 45 minutes later and are trying to pick the movie back up again, meanwhile all your friends have had the benefit of watching the entire plot. Well, it feels much like that.

While it is challenging to discover what has been missed while away, it is also interesting to come back with clear, “new” eyes. For the past month, I’ve been reaching out to fellow CXPA members, Board members and others to catch up and find out what I’ve missed while away.  Here are three observations I have as we ring in the new year:

Observation 1:
Customer Experience – Fast and Furious.

Customer Experience, as both a discipline and profession, has grown rapidly over the past ten years. The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) has ridden that wave and as more people discovered the challenging and fulfilling work that comes with focusing on the customer, our association has continued to grow. This year, however, seems to be an explosion of growth in use of the words: customer experience, customer success, employee engagement and all other terms related to experience. 

I’ve heard from many CX practitioners expressing concern that confusion continues to grow as the definition of customer experience expands to cover products, services, marketing and more, across a growing marketplace where CX is the term du jour.

CXPA members thrive on the true practice of customer experience, as defined in the CXPA Member Wiki as:

The sum of all interactions across all channels, shaped by an organization’s culture. This culture is created by front-end and back-end processes and experiences that ultimately influence customer perceptions. These perceptions either strengthen or detract from our relationship with our customers and our brand consideration in the market.

In 2014, CXPA introduced a professional certification for the customer experience discipline. With the Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), the members of CXPA established knowledge standards required for successful customer experience practitioners. The six core competencies that make up the CCXP test are fields within the discipline that experienced practitioners recognize as essential for organizations to succeed in customer experience.

Five years later, there are over 800 Certified Customer Experience Professionals (CCXPs) worldwide, and that number continued to grow. It will be critical in 2019 for CXPA members and current CCXPs to continue to promote and highlight this agnostic certification as a set of standards and a recognized definition in an environment with rapidly growing media spin and marketing growth.
 
Observation 2: Being a CX Practitioner – It’s a Wonderful Life, Or Is it?

Every year CXPA welcomes new CX practitioners, many of whom have just started a role in customer experience and they are seeking to learn from the experience and thought leadership of others in the field.

We also lose quite a few members each year. For the past six years, our leadership and staff have studied why members choose not to re-join our community. One thing we’ve landed on repeatedly is the understanding that many of our members leave CXPA as they leave their customer experience role. Leaving this role has two main themes:  The organization leaders changed the role or department or the profession isn’t what they expected because of its complexity and large change management.  It isn’t an easy job.

The 2018 report from Temkin Group State of the CX Profession, 2018 (CXPA Members can download the report free with this code) state that 96% of CX professionals believe that customer experience is a great profession to be in. Eighty-eight percent of CX professionals stated they are satisfied with the people they work with, and 87% are satisfied with the content of their jobs.  However, Temkin Group found that only 54% are satisfied with the opportunities for professional advancement and there has been a steady decline in the level of satisfaction with overall compensation, which in 2018 had dropped to 71%.
 
 Additionally, The CEO View of CX, a report from Walker released in late 2016 (summary available to CXPA members here) states that CEOs surveyed recognized customer experience as more important to creating competitive advantage than other factors like talent, product, brand and pricing. The CEOs also felt that customer experience was the responsibility of everyone across the organization.
 
CXPA is placing significant focus this year on improved content and community sharing and support. It will be critical in 2019 for CXPA members to support each other through sharing experience, tools and templates as we continue to support CX professionals in demonstrating their value within their organizations.
 
Observation 3: Future Relies On – The Matrix
 
I’ll admit I’m being a bit tongue in cheek referencing a movie that features the technological fall of man due to self-aware artificial intelligence, or AI. Technology and data area featured quite a bit when discussing customer experience right now, but it is imperative to remember empathy, listening and culture. As more and more organizations seek customer experience shortcuts, it is imperative that we continue to advocate for the long term, challenging changes that will bring a truly improved experience for customers.
 
As part of this focus, CXPA leadership is committed to working closely with more industry partners this year by building a larger footprint of influence and expertise. Last year, CXPA partnered with several events and organizations to showcase customer experience as defined by this association. It will be critical in 2019 for CXPA to continue in our efforts to build strong and rewarding partnerships across the industry. These partnerships bring opportunities and education to members while also advocating on a wider scale for the customer experience core competencies recognized by CXPA members.
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01-06-2019 04:23 PM

Thanks for these observations, Lesley, and welcome back! 

You're right on about the significance of CCXP in standardizing our profession's body of knowledge. One thing I like to say about the definition of customer experience is that it has always existed since the first humans bartered. Wrapping our heads around it for mutual gain among seller and buyer is what we're all about.

As a buyer myself, I like to think of the definition of customer experience as "my realities compared to my expectations" as the shortest way to say it, or "Customers’ realities in selecting, getting, and using a solution that enables a capability they want". I think it's also important to differentiate customer experience management as "the degree of alignment company-wide to customers' priorities in the pursuit of maximizing customer lifetime value". I'm looking forward to 2019 as a bold year!