On CX Day 2019, I’m here to tell you, from one CX professional to another, that customer experience is a rewarding and exciting role – even with its great deal of responsibility.

The Importance of CX Professionals

Most companies take a quantitative approach to calculating the value of their product and services – such as adding new features and functionality for an additional cost. But customers don’t just buy products or services. The experience they have with a brand is both emotional and critical. It helps them determine whether or not they will return, make a positive recommendation to a colleague, or share negative comments on social media. A company can have the best product and service in its industry, but its value diminishes if the customer doesn’t have a positive experience.

As a CX professional, your role may be to drive growth, reduce churn, improve the value associated with the brand or similar aspirations. For me, at Medallia, my job is to partner with CX professionals and business executives like you. I ensure that your team is maximizing the benefits of working with Medallia’s team. It’s important to me that you’re optimizing the use of our products and services, and that we’re having a significant impact on your company’s success. 

With the help of Medallia Experience Cloud, I’m getting real-time customer signals from multiple channels. The customer feedback has helped my team understand our customer’s needs and take immediate actions to improve the quality of our services and products. That experience is gratifying. 

CX Strategies

I want to share a few things I’ve learned while working with some of the world’s most valued brands:

1. Build trust – in the world of B2B CX, it is critical to build trust with your customers. For me, that means we must understand our customer’s objectives, expectations, and constraints. We focus on the questions that will get us to that understanding. For example, what results do you expect to get from your CX program? How much time and resources are available to implement such a program? How do you measure the values or impacts? Who will be responsible for running and improving this program after the launch? Is there buy-in from various stakeholders? These discussions help build a roadmap for a long-term partnership and will maximize value and success.  
2. It’s OK to say “no” – Our customers are leveraging our platform to help transform their business. They’re hungry for expertise and experience, and want us to guide them through this process. So if a client selects an approach that may prevent them from achieving maximum value or sustainable results, we share our thoughts. We provide appropriate recommendations based on our experience and industry best practices. 
3. Build a CX roadmap: no need to eat the elephant all at once – Improving customer experience is a journey. After selecting a scalable platform and a trusted partner, it’s best to build a phased roadmap that includes a series of programs or projects. Each program should have clearly defined objectives and success criteria. It’s better to break down large programs into smaller deliverables. To help our customers develop a CX roadmap, we have developed a CX maturity assessment service. This program is great for organizations who are new to the CX journey as well as those looking for on-going improvement. 
4. Focus on adoption – CX program design includes more than just the needs of CX professionals. In defining a CX roadmap, we must look at use adoption. There are two types of adoption. First, the response rate is a commonly used metric for CX programs. Consider strategies to increase the response rate during the design phase rather than waiting until the program launches. Second, increased adoption depends on integration between CX programs and business operations. Among our customers, the leaders have achieved a lot more success by integrating CX programs into their day-to-day operations rather than running independent CX programs. 

Advice to CX Professionals

To excel at your job, don’t be afraid to jump in and get started. It’s such a rewarding role. You also have to believe in your company’s offerings. If you don’t appreciate your own products and services, you’ll find it hard to ensure that your customers are satisfied with your company.

Here at Medallia, we believe in what we’re offering to others. In fact, we use our own software to understand what our customers and employees experience. That makes my job so much more enjoyable, as I can quickly see the impact of what we do.

Happy CX Day!