What do I love most about CXPA? Its values: Be Connected + Be Authentic + Be a Champion. In a nutshell, these values describe what I’ve consistently felt since the Customer Experience Professional Association’s inception.
It was an interesting process last fall at the CXPA Board of Directors offsite when each person around the table shared how it feels to be part of the CXPA – in three words. While there was variation in phrasing, clear themes emerged: the Values you see below. We split into three groups to further describe each theme: these are Behaviors associated with each Value. Then the CXPA staff shared this draft with co-chairs of member volunteer committees. Their further refinement resulted in this table:
What I love so much about the CXPA Values is: they’re real! Surprisingly, our association had never articulated Core Values before, but our association had succeeded in fostering consistent feelings of being connected, authentic, and a champion. How did this come about? CXPA’s co-founders, early Board members, and sole employee (Lesley Lykins) believed in being a member-driven, member-led organization. And gratitude, friendliness, transparency and generosity have always been hallmarks of our members’ attitudes and actions. I’ve been president of other associations’ chapters and I certainly enjoyed it. Yet there’s always been something special about CXPA since day one. These Values wonderfully describe what’s special about CXPA.
Characteristics of Ideal Customer Management: What’s more, these values sum up what we as CX leaders must radiate to all our stakeholders. Since customer experience is not something a few individuals or departments can guarantee by themselves, we need to facilitate our business units and functional areas enterprise-wide to be connected, authentic, and a champion for customers’ well-being.
Criteria for Impactful Executive Sponsorship: In fact, these values illustrate what’s required for our respective organizations’ leaders to walk the CX talk. Tweak the behavior statements to fit executive sponsors’ roles. As long as the outcomes of those behaviors are “everyone feels valued, we are trusted, and we advance together”, your executive sponsors will be fostering the cross-functional collaboration and end-to-end coordination across the customer life cycle that’s essential for customer experience excellence.
Guiding Our Future: These CXPA Values were articulated to guide our future: it’s the criteria we “live and die” by, they’re the guardrails for what to cheer and what to prevent, the line in the sand to ensure our association consistently fosters these feelings as it grows, a reminder to all members and participants about how we interact and make decisions.
I’m excited about CXPA’s future. These Values encourage us all to jointly shape our association to achieve all it can be, helping each of us in the process to be the best CX leaders possible, and in turn, guiding our respective organizations in better serving customers and reaping rewards of ongoing growth.
What do you think of these Values?