Director of customer experience is a leadership role, required to supervise and oversee the strategy, planning and execution of the organization’s overall customer experience goals.
This recently emerged 21st century role is critical to the success of an organization’s customer-centric vision and meeting business goals through delivering great customer experience. While the designations could vary, in this article we focus on the role of a director CX as the senior most person in an organization responsible for ensuring great customer experience and tying that up with the overall business growth.
Let’s dive in and explore the details of this role!
Table Of Contents
- Role Of A Director Customer Experience (CX)
- Key Skills Required For The Role Of Director Customer Experience (CX)
- Job Description: Key Responsibilities Of Director Customer Experience (CX)
Role Of A Director Customer Experience (CX)
Director of customer experience (CX)Opens a new window is a leadership role, required to supervise and oversee the strategy, planning and execution of the organization’s overall customer experience goals. This includes liaising with other department heads to ensure all other teams contribute equally to providing customers a seamless experience across touchpoints.
The director of customer experience is an organization’s highest authority responsible for creating, managing and executing the customer experience strategy of the organization.
In an interconnected world where different departments in an organization need to work collaboratively to create the perfect customer experience symphony, the need for a leadership role that can orchestrate this way of working, is becoming increasingly evident. A simple search on the internet for job openings for a director of customer experience lists out thousands of vacancies across the globe. LinkedIn shows more than 16,000 openings for director of customer experience, in the U.S. alone.
The director CX is in-charge of delivering a seamless customer experience across all stages and touchpoints in a customer journey and helping the company continually achieve greater customer satisfaction, increased efficiency and profitability. The director CX plays a key role in outlining and achieving how customers perceive the company while driving higher customer satisfaction, NPS, customer retention, new business growth and profitable turnovers.
Simply put, director customer experience is the torchbearer of a customer-centric culture in an organization that leads to great customer experience.
Key Skills Required For The Role Of Director Customer Experience (CX)
There are a host of skills required of the role of a director CX, that spans across departments in today’s digital age. Here is a list of key skills you should look for:
1. Strategic thinking and foresight: As the person in-charge of the overall customer experience, director CX should be able to foresee market changes, dynamism in customer expectations and strategize to guide the company to live up to those expectations in the fast-evolving digital world. In many cases, the director of CX in large organizations will actually be responsible for driving CX strategy trends in the organization’s domain of business.
For example, after Apple’s first iPhone was launched in 2007, consumers’ expectations from a phone underwent a complete transformation. While, Samsung rose to the occasion with quick adaptation of the Android ecosystem and successfully rivaled Apple for its industry domination, Nokia and Blackberry failed to grow up to those expectations. They soon became historic legends and lost nearly all of their market share in a matter of a few years. It was the job of customer experience then, to track changes in customer expectations and adapt to it quickly to save the business from extinction at the hands of competition.
2. Interpersonal, networking and influencing skills: For someone who not only needs to nurture great relationships internally with his own team and leaders of other teams, but also understand the pulse of customers and external stakeholders such as vendors and channel partners, interpersonal and networking skills are indispensable.
Additionally, the director CX constantly needs to liaise with or convince other CXOs, leaders and business stakeholders to work in sync with the customer experience strategy which requires great interpersonal, communication and influencing skills. Whenever there are areas of conflict between certain teams that can potentially impact customer experience, the director CX needs to leverage these skills to ensure all the involved teams work with customer experience as the end goal in mind.
3. Problem-solving and analytical skills: Director CX should be adept at interpreting and leveraging data insights for constantly enhancing customer experience. Ability to understand data analytics and extract useful or actionable information from it along with strong problem-solving skills is a power-packed combination for ensuring customer experience gaps do not occur or are resolved efficiently. It is essential for the director CX to be able to see through data and identify potential concerns and their respective solutions to be able to guide the team to be able to deliver best-in-class customer experience.
4. Ability to understand business objectives and align CX accordingly: As the person in-charge for the overall CX strategy, a director CX needs to have a clear understanding of the company’s business objectives so that he can strategize CX efforts such that it contributes to the achievement of the business goals. A clear picture of business objectives and the ability to align CX with the same, puts the director CX in a stronger position to get buy-in from the CEO and CXOs and to propagate a customer-centric culture within the organization.
5. Working backwards to lead the end-user experience: The director CX should be able to visualize end-user experience and then work backwards to plan, strategize and execute CX efforts to deliver great experiences. As Steve Jobs once said, “You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around,†a director CX should have the ability to crystal gaze what a customer will experience through each interaction with the brand, across touchpoints and then design the CX strategy accordingly. This is possible through a data-mindset and an ability to draw meaningful insights from the same, which brings us to our next point.
6. Data-driven mindset and an aptitude for technology: Data and technology make for the foundation of today’s customer experience efforts and this marketing technology landscape itself is still evolving. This means, the director CX cannot do without being adept on all the tools and technologies that help businesses deliver, manage, measure and improve customer experience.
In addition to these, the director CX should obviously display strong leadership, team building, project-management and delegation skills. As a leader, the director CX should be able to hire, develop, train and build a high-performing customer experience team that efficiently aligns with the customer experience strategy.
Let’s now find out what a typical job description for this role includes.
Job Description: Key Responsibilities Of Director Customer Experience (CX)
A typical formal job description for a director customer experience includes the following key roles and responsibilities.
- Ensure that the customer experience team works in collaboration with all other business functions, consistently delivering great end-to-end customer experience across stages, channels and touchpoints in the customer journey
- Enabling a two-way stream with customer facing teams through – collecting feedback from customer facing teams to derive meaningful insights for improvements and; guiding teams to ensure a customer-centric attitude while acquiring new customers or dealing with existing customers, especially guiding the marketing, branding and sales teams to align with the larger CX strategy.
- Build and manage a team of business analysts and customer experience specialists with deep domain expertise in customer experience journeys
- Encourage problem-solving, strategic thinking and customer-orientation amongst the team
- Liaise with directors or heads of other teams such as sales, marketing, customer support, branding, finance, IT and account management to ensure customer-centricity in their respective departmental work and help them deliver in accordance with the overall customer experience strategy.
- Advocate for changes in other departments’ ways of working and cross functionally collaborate with teams to implement a change, if required for the improvement of overall customer experience
- Measure and track delivery ROI on identified transformation opportunities for customer experience along with driving continuous process improvement culture across customer experience
- Interact at executive/senior management level, proactively advocating for solutions and managing the customer escalation process
- Create and implement an analytics strategy for best in class service delivery. Leverage existing and additional relevant technologies for reporting and analytics across customer service and other customer facing functions/ channels
Depending on the business, particularly for manufacturing, at times organizations may seek someone with an experience in or with knowledge of quality management systems such as ISO, 6-Sigma, lean leadership and so on, as well.
We hope this article helped you understand the role of a director CX and its skill requirements. In case, we’ve missed something feel free to share with us on LinkedIn or Twitter!
Learn More: Top 10 Digital Customer Experience (CX) Software Platforms For 2020