Did the customer already loose?
In a recent hiring for a multinational brand (VP Customer Experience) the job ad didn’t ask for a single competency related to the customer.
From the hiring:
“We are looking for a talented and experienced individual to join our team. The ideal candidate should have a master’s degree in Management, Economics, Finance, Business or similar fields and several years of experience working within strategic analysis, business development, or equivalent roles at an investment bank, a consulting firm, or in an internal corporate function.” (it goes on and only gets worse).
Customer Experience works when you make it about three things: 1. the customer, 2. the experience and 3. the business.
If companies have started hiring for roles like this example, misusing the term Customer Experience for a management role with no expected expertise in what you are supposed to manage then our customers have already lost.
CX is there to help the business partner with the customer to achieve equal progress. But it can only do that if we let it.
Pretending to focus on the customer while clearly demonstrating no interest in including them, or assuming that the customer can be managed like any other internal resource is going to be counter productive.
And it will lead us five years down the road when we will look back at CX and complain about it never working. And we won’t ask the question why it didn’t work and we won’t learn that it was because we (again*) was given something valuable and managed to wreck it.
*other examples are CRM, Customer Centricity and personalization (1).
This job ad isn’t in any way unique. I’m seeing people with every type of expertise showing up as CX’ers these days just because they have an interface with the customer (or their data).
It’s all watering out why CX is valuable and what makes it valuable. Until one day we will get complaints that it never worked .. and it didn’t. It only worked in the beginning when it remembered what it was for: the customer.
Sources:
(1). https://lnkd.in/dmk3gcQU
