All CX practitioners know success is closely linked to skills, but the specific skillset they – and their teams – require, is always changing.
When CX Network researched the Global State of CX in 2024, we asked the practitioners to select all the skills they were training their workforce in. The most selected reponses were product knowledge (59 percent), soft skills including emotional intelligence, adaptability, empathy and resilience (51 percent) and messaging/ communication skills (50 percent).
However, leveraging AI/ML was one of the least selected responses (29 percent) and ranked alongside the response choices "we outsource for specific skill sets instead of training in-house" (10 percent) and "we did not conduct any training this year" (five percent).
In this article, CX Network speaks to David Hicks, co-founder and chair of XM Coach, to find out which skills CX practitioners and team builders need to prioritize.
CX Network: Given the rapid pace of change in CX last year, what are the top three skills customer experience managers will need this year?
David Hicks: Regardless of the changes that we saw last year, the basic skill sets and capabilities for CX leaders – being customer centric, curious, generous and humble – remain relatively unchanged.
The ability to work across an organization remains paramount. CX leaders have to pull teams of people together that are likely not reporting to the same person, but their collaboration is critical to building the end-to-end experience. This puts a focus on collaboration skills and the ability to be politically agile across an organization.
At the same time, however, they must be able to understand and interpret the ambition of the business and keep everybody focused on that ambition. This means strategy deployment skills are key. Getting an organization to build its CX ambition seems to be relatively easy, but ensuring it is persistently and consistently delivered is less easy.
“The third skillset is tech translation. There has always been a need to understand your requirements, then translate and interpret the technology that is available – we do not see that changing.”
A great example of this exists in the telco industry. A speaker at an event once told me that she had introduced a systematic, templated approach by which to interview and categorize vendors. She would ask each to explain who they are, what it is they uniquely do and what potential needs she had that could suit their capabilities.
Those questions were asked and a template completed for every vendor she met and when she needed to find somebody for a specific solution, she had that body of information to refer to. This meant that instead of being distracted by all the exciting things we get from vendors, she could align their proposition with what the business needed.
CX Network: Which recent developments in CX have elevated the importance of these skills?
David Hicks: Last year we saw an increased focus on proving returns for CX initiatives. Organizations that have a strong understanding of this now are investing more into CX as a source of differentiation and a way to do more with less.
On the other side of that coin, where an organization cannot prove the ROI of its investments, they are likely to consider removing CX costs.
Forrester believes this will happen at scale throughout 2023. There is already some evidence in the US where organizations have lost patience with the CX agenda and, as a result, the whole experience team has been removed. I see that as probably the most significant development for this year.
Most organizations are already piloting ChatGPT and AI tools. I do not see any other big tech changes coming into the CX market, but there could be further developments around Voice of the Customer (VOC) platforms.
These are well established and have continued to evolve, but there are new requirements from organizations that have been using VOC systems for a while. There are many more feedback sources such as solicited and unsolicited feedback, for example, as well as operational data, all on different platforms.
This has created the need for an AI-based interpretation that summarizes which two or three key things the senior leadership team really needs to focus on.
“I am seeing some second-generation platforms that will effectively take all these sources and serve up the things that need focus. Without this kind of analysis, more insights can be unhelpful.”
Most other areas of CX technology are pretty mature. The evidence for this is that we are seeing increased merger and acquisition activity between companies in the CX market and this will likely gather pace in 2023.
CX Network: We have covered leadership skills for individuals. When it comes to building a service or customer-facing team, however, what are the most important customer service skills that CX leaders should recruit for?
David Hicks: You need to understand how the experience and service you offer directly underpins your business strategy. I know a CX leader in hospitality who does this very well and they have identified the skills and capabilities that are required in the service operation to build and deliver a premium experience for guests.
To do this they start with the strategy then identify the capabilities that are needed to deliberately design a premium experience and consistently deliver that experience. If you start with the skills, you will likely miss the connection with the strategy, which is quite important.
A deep understanding of the role of the service manager is also essential in this.
Customer feedback is often thrown back into an organization and the service manager is expected to act on it. If you are a six sigma, black belt, you already have a way of doing process improvements, but less likely you will have a structured approach to deliberately designing the experience. A common approach to experience design, typically does not exist in service teams.
If you are a service leader, I think it is important that you have a systematic approach to experience design, establish your sources of feedback and build that closed loop, where you seek your feedback and then tell customers you have dealt with it. Doing that, however, needs a systematic approach.
Asking service managers to do without experience design skills is a bit of a stretch and often they fix the process, but don’t deliberately design the experience side of things.