Building a CX team: Essential skills for success

If your organization doesn’t have a team dedicated to customer experience, it might be time to build one. While everyone in your organization should want to provide good customer service, having a team focused on cultivating good customer experiences can elevate your company. 

Having a team that considers and can influence all of the touchpoints along the customer journey is major for businesses focused on acquiring and retaining customers. These teams look at each stage of the customer journey, analyze customer feedback and interactions with your brand, and work to encourage customer loyalty. 

Building a CX team: The skills you need

Building a successful CX team requires a cross-functional approach and various skills essential for understanding, analyzing, and influencing every touchpoint along the customer journey. Here are the crucial skills required to build a high-performing CX team.

A customer-centric mindset

Building a customer-centric culture is the cornerstone of an effective CX team. Every member of the team, regardless of their role, should possess a genuine empathy for customers and a deep understanding of their needs, preferences, and pain points. Empathy allows the team to view the customer journey from the customer's perspective, identifying areas for improvement and creating strategies to enhance the overall experience.

Communication and collaboration

Strong communication and collaboration skills are essential for a cohesive CX team. Members must be adept at conveying their ideas and insights and actively listening to customer feedback and interdepartmental input. Effective collaboration ensures that the CX team can work seamlessly with other departments, aligning strategies and initiatives to deliver a unified and consistent customer experience.

Basic data analysis and interpretation

An analytical mindset coupled with the ability to interpret customer data is crucial for optimizing the customer experience. CX team members don’t necessarily need to have a background in data science, but they should be comfortable using technology to uncover insights and put them into action. Through data-driven decision-making, the team can identify trends, anticipate customer needs, and tailor strategies that resonate with the target audience.

Problem-solving and creativity

CX team members must be able to identify challenges and come up with creative solutions. Members should use their problem-solving skills to address customer pain points, streamline processes, and innovate new approaches to enhance the overall customer journey. Creativity is key in designing memorable and impactful experiences that delight customers and set the company apart from competitors.

Adaptability and agility

CX team members should be adaptable to changing customer preferences, market trends, and technological advancements. Agility enables the team to respond proactively to shifts in customer behavior, industry disruptions, or emerging opportunities, ensuring that your company continues to meet its customers’ needs.

Customer feedback management

Proficiency in managing and leveraging customer feedback is fundamental for a CX team. This includes being able to gather, analyze, and act upon customer insights effectively. It also involves establishing systems and processes for soliciting feedback, measuring customer satisfaction, and implementing continuous improvements based on the feedback received.

Change management

Change management skills are critical for driving organizational and cultural changes that prioritize the customer experience. CX team leaders should exhibit strong change management abilities, guiding the team through transformative initiatives, inspiring a customer-centric mindset across the organization, and cultivating an agile culture.

Creating a vision for your customer experience team 

While implementing a cohesive and consistent experience for customers is likely the goal of most businesses, figuring out how to improve the existing products or services, collaborating on new ideas, and starting up a two-way dialogue with users will help bring specifics on the vision to life.

Every business wants to deliver a great customer experience, but what does that look like in practice? Once you have a CX team, they should focus on answering questions about streamlining internal operations, aligning departments, and acting on customer feedback.

Here are a few things a new CX team may consider:

• Can we consolidate our processes, systems, or approaches to improve the customer experience? Mapping the customer journey will help you understand things from your customers’ shoes.
• Is the messaging, tone, and branding in line with what we hope to deliver to our customers?
• Are we using the best tools and mediums to create a streamlined workflow for our customer-facing team members?
• Are we getting enough feedback from our customers and is the way we gather that feedback effortless?

Customer journey considerations 

A good CX team will work across departments to ensure a consistent, unified customer experience. When they discover points of friction, they’ll work with the appropriate teams to resolve them. For example, if the CX team discovers a significant number of customers are requesting a new product, they might take that request to the product team to meet the need. Or if they notice a spike in customer service calls about a website issue, they would report the issue to the web development team. 

Designers, marketers, product teams, and support staff must follow an end-to-end cycle to deliver the best customer experience. Product teams must communicate to Marketing and support them in positioning products to users. Marketing should inform the product team how they are promoting the products and services. Support teams should share customer comments, complaints, and requests with Marketing and Product. Design should work with Product and Marketing to offer consistency and clarity throughout the customer experience. 

Consider that the same person who talks to your sales agents will also talk to a support representative or follow your organization’s social media profiles. The experience should feel no different to the customer no matter who they are speaking with inside the business. 

Align your CX team with your company values

The experience you offer your customers needs to align with the values of your company. 

Whether the interaction is through advertising, product use, recruitment, service, or supplier relations, double-check that it is a reflection of the business vision and values that your business preaches. 

When building your CX team, make sure its members are ambassadors of your brand by holding relevant workshops, lightning talks, and frequent social media training. The strength of your entire company’s understanding of the customer journey and experience should bloom from the expertise of your CX team.