For CX efforts to have a lasting positive impact, they must align with the overall priorities of the organization. This competency is about tracking and ensuring that CX efforts achieve well-defined business objectives, which often requires a clear set of CX metrics. We’ve defined three XM Skills under this Competency:

Value planning

Organizations should start their CX journeys with a clear definition of what they want their efforts to achieve. This involves forecasting the specific business value of CX efforts and defining how exactly this value will be tracked.

Value delivery

The context in which organizations deliver experiences is constantly changing – people’s expectations change, competitors change, business strategy changes – which means companies need to continuously track the value they are creating and make ongoing adjustments to the experiences.

Metrics management

A strong CX program identifies key metrics using X- and O-data and then uses those metrics to drive operational priorities. The metrics program must define realistic targets for its core CX metric as well as all its key driver metrics based on how they influence desired business outcomes.

People generally gravitate towards the status quo, so CX efforts must help overcome this natural inertia. This competency is about making sure that people at the organization – including employees, leaders, and partners – have the appropriate skills, support, and motivation to achieve desired CX results. We’ve defined three XM Skills under this Competency:

Ecosystem communications

People are more likely to stay aligned with transformation efforts when they understand why things are changing, so CX programs must keep employees and partners informed about the value and progress of their efforts. To be effective, communications should define key messages and cascade them through management layers and across teams, reaching all levels of the organization.

Expertise building

Since CX requires people to learn a new set of behaviors and practices, organizations will need to build, proliferate, and enhance key CX skills.

Role-based enablement

Companies must ensure that their employees and partners have the skills, training, tools, and motivation to successfully adopt customer-centric behaviors. Since positive reinforcement is key to changing behaviors, organizations should recognize and celebrate the individuals and teams who demonstrate desired CX practices.

To improve the experiences it delivers, an organization must be capable of collecting and processing a constant flow of X-data and O-data and then transforming it into useful information. This competency is about providing actionable insights across an organization. We’ve defined four XM Skills under this Competency:

X-data & O-data integration

Companies can generate actionable insights by combining operational data (O-data) – such as segment profiles, product ownership, and previous interactions – together with experience data (X-data) in a single system. Bringing these disparate data sources together will facilitate the use of advanced analytics and ultimately yield richer insights.

Experience monitoring

CX programs must identify and capture the appropriate signals from the appropriate audiences at the appropriate times.

Insights discovery

CX efforts must constantly analyze X- and O-data to uncover meaningful insights and identify which actions to prioritize. Companies can generate deeper, richer insights when they analyze the data by segments and when they blend together quantitative and qualitative feedback.

Insights distribution

CX truly becomes valuable when companies share X- and O-data insights in the right form, at the right time, and tailored to the people best equipped to act on the information. This skill includes creating customized alerts and dashboards that are synchronized to the operational and decision-making cadences of internal stakeholders.

Gathering and distributing insights is all well and good, but ultimately, an organization needs to act on what it learns. This competency is about prioritizing and driving improvements based on insights. We’ve defined four XM Skills under this Competency:

Immediate response

Any successful CX effort must include the capability to systematically follow up with people who are affected by an experience – as indicated by their feedback or discovered through analytics – and fix the problems that are uncovered.

Continuous improvement

Organizations need to make ongoing changes to operational processes based on a continuous flow of X- and O-data insights. This skill often includes a well-defined process for diagnosing and prioritizing potential areas of improvement depending on how they would impact experiences and business results.

Strategic decision-making

Organizations should use insights from X- and O-data to make strategic decisions.

Process integration

In addition to making decisions based on insights, organizations should infuse those insights into key operating processes and systems.

While finding and fixing problems is necessary, it alone is not sufficient for capturing people’s hearts and minds. This competency is about identifying and creating experiences that differentiate the organization. We’ve defined three XM Skills under this Competency:

Experience visioning

The foundation of this skill is uncovering opportunities for disruptive new experiences. One of the ways companies can implement this capability is by creating journey maps, which will allow them to both understand customer needs and perceptions and uncover potential opportunities for improvement.

Experience design

Once companies have identified a potential opportunity, they need to apply human-centric approaches to create or improve that experience.

Experience integration

It’s not enough to just design new experiences. Strong CX requires organizations to develop the processes, systems, and training that will enable them to deliver new experiences in a consistent fashion.