Customer Experience (CX) Specialist: Key Role, Skill Set And Job Description
The role of a customer experience (CX) specialist is to ensure that the marketer follows a buyer-centric approach and delivers a smooth, unfragmented and consistent customer experience across all touchpoints and at all stages of the buyer journey.
A customer experience specialist is responsible for keeping track of customer journeys, interacting with customers across channels and platforms, and coordinating with all internal stakeholders such as product design or development, sales, marketing, account management and so on, in order to keep fine-tuning the customer’s experience. Since no business can compete effectively without a great customer experience, the need for CX specialists too is on the rise.
If you’re someone looking to hire a customer experience specialist or a customer experience professional looking for more details, this article has all the information about the role, its skill requirements and the expectations of the job market. Let’s dive in!
Table Of Contents
- The Evolving Role Of CX Specialists In Complex, Omni-channel Markets
- Essential Skills Of A CX Specialist
- Job Description: Key Responsibilities Of CX Specialists
Evolving Role Of Customer Experience (CX) Specialists In Complex, Omni-channel Markets
The scope of this role is highly complex in the always on, always connected, multi-channel, multi-device work where most marketers – whether B2B or B2C – operate and compete now. Gone are the days when the scope of a customer experience manager was limited to tracking conversations at the customer service or support centre and ensuring that escalations were minimized. Today, customer experience specialists need to track a complex buyer journey across online and offline platforms and channels, devices and touchpoints. Each touchpoint where customers interact, transact or engage with the brand is an opportunity to build a positive predisposition towards the brand, or a minefield where the customer can be put off the brand for good.
Here, it is also important to point out that the customer experience specialist has to address the bigger picture brand experience (the overall experience of the brand across all touchpoints including even display ads or franchise outlets), as well as the buyer experience, in a specific buying journey that ends in conversion. The outcome is a smooth, seamless customer experience across various touchpoints and channels, both online and offline.
As customers increasingly choose great experience above everything else including price and even features at times, an increasing number of both B2B and B2C businesses are investing in hiring customer experience specialists whose job it is to understand unique buyer needs, expectations and journeys; and build brand and buying experience that create a real competitive advantage for the brand.
The role of a customer experience specialist is to create exceptional brand and buying experiences for a customer or a prospect, across touchpoints – both digital and physical. To be able to do so, one must demonstrate strong product knowledge along with an ability to efficiently interact with customers, understand their buying journeys, pain points; and align with other business functions or internal stakeholders such as product development or design team, sales, marketing, and customer service team, to find solutions for the same.
The customer experience specialist generally reports into the customer experience director, customer experience head or in smaller teams, to someone in the marketing leadership who owns CX within the organization.
Learn More: Director Of Customer Experience: Role, Skill Set And Job Description
Essential Skills Of A Customer Experience (CX) Specialist
- Empathy and listening skills: empathy is by far the most critical skill for a customer experience specialist. It is the ability to understand other people’s emotions. It requires you to go beyond simply saying that you care, rather put yourself in the customer’s shoes to feel what they feel. Only then can they proactively identify the gaps or concerns customers may come across in their journey and alleviate the chances of such occurrences. Listening skills too, are crucial to tap into the real insights behind what customers are saying, either in person, on the phone with customer service or even on social media to their peers.
Learn More: Multichannel vs. Omnichannel Marketing: Key Differences and Similarities
2. Collaboration and project management: identifying gaps in the customer experience is the easier part of the job! The more difficult side is actually working with various functional stakeholders to ensure those gaps are filled. For example, a delayed billing process leading to loss of customers would mean working with both- finance and IT to ensure the process is smoothed out. A poor mobile website user experience would mean working with marketers, IT, UX and other functional reps. A new social media platform that’s got your primary target audience hooked would mean working with multiple stakeholders to get an actionable strategy in place to capitalize on that platform in a timely manner.
3. Speed, flexibility and agility: Business and customer dynamics are ever-changing and demand agility, flexibility and of course, speed. It is the job of the CX specialist to ot just red-flag breaks in CX that need immediate fixing, but also opportunities to build ever stronger experiences that can deliver real competitive advantage.
4. Data management and analytics : Everything companies learn about customers journeys is documented in form of data. A customer experience specialist should be able to easily read and interpret the data to extract useful information that can be acted upon. While most organizations have a dedicated data management, analytics or customer ops team, it is critical for a customer experience specialist to be able to work with these teams to make the best CX related decisions based on the data.
Learn More: Customer Service Vs Customer Experience (CX): Key Differences And Similarities
Job Description: Key Responsibilities Of CX Specialists
Followed by an introductory note about the company’s business, the job description iterates roles and responsibilities, qualification requirements etc. for the job. Let us now look at the typical job description of a customer experience specialist. This can vary a bit as per the industry or business.
- Identifying ideal customer profiles and mapping customer journeys to identify the gaps in customer experience across all touchpoints, for all kinds of customer interactions, transactions and engagements – from purchase to product return to customer support.
- Liaise with internal teams such as marketing, sales, product development, account management, billing, finance, UX etc. to ensure that gaps in the customer experience- irrespective of where they occur in the journey – are plugged
- Regular communication with internal stakeholders such as customer service executives and other customer-facing teams to identify gaps and opportunities, if any in the brand experience
- Raising red flags wherever the business process – billing, installation or anything pre or post sales – needs correction to ensure the customer has a seamless experience with the company
- Ensuring the CX strategies are aligned to the larger marketing and business goals and outcomes
- Collect, track and analyze customer feedback and suggest improvements internally based on the insights gathered – help measure metrics such as NPS to gauge how the brand is performing on CX performance parameters
- Work with the technology teams to ensure a seamless brand and buying experience with the technology- be it the brand website or a self-service app
Learn More: What is an Omnichannel Customer Experience? Definition, Journeys and Examples
We hope this gives you a great idea about the nature of the role and key responsibilities of CX Specialist. What have we missed? Share with us on LinkedIn in or Twitter!
