Top 5 Things to Look For When Hiring a CXO
Are you recruiting a CX leader or Chief Experience Officer (CXO) for your business? What qualities and experience will get you the best candidate?
Before you start hiring for a CXO, be sure to ask “are we ready…?” Embracing CX likely drives towards enterprise transformation to put the customer at the centre of what you do. If you are ready, here are some pointers what to look for to ensure your CX program and its leader are set up for success.
An instinct for partnership
Effective CX delivery requires cross business understanding and collaboration. The CX lead needs have an instinct for partnering and cross business working. To have strong EQ skills and effective in driving cross-team collaboration, with strong empathy and communication skills to engage a range of people at all levels and have a record of building partnerships at all levels.
A CXO will to build collaborations with the CIO, CTO and others, all critical to the customer-centric business transformation that is taking place, so they should be involved in the specification of the role and hiring process.
Experience in HR and internal comms preferred
Effective CX requires the employee experience to be aligned and supportive to delivery of the intended customer experience. A CX leader’s therefore needs a dual focus on external customer-related activity at the same time to ensure the deliberate design and persistent, consistent delivery of the required employee experience.
Understand the role of digital in delivery of the end-to-end experience
The recent Covid pandemic has accelerated the penetration of digital tools and approaches, more importantly these tools are now more acceptable to B2C / B2B customers and critically also to colleagues. The CX leader needs to understand the role of digital tools and technologies in delivery of the deliberately designed end to end experience.
Effective engagement is key which means understanding of content is a necessity
The relationship between customer and business is more fluid than ever. Loyalty is won and lost on effective and meaningful engagement. Partners, Customers and Colleagues within B2B or B2C, are all now content creators.
As digital plays a larger role in the end-to-end experience, businesses must identify, aggregate and use content to engage with all their audiences to directly drive improved performance.
10 years’ experience in data management and CRM
Data has been a cornerstone of effective customer experience since the discipline started to emerge. Customer, colleague, and partner expectations have all increased and anticipate personalised interactions and services. This requires data analysis to identify these different personas and effective data application to deliver these tailored experienced.
The CX lead needs to understand how and where data is critical to delivery of the optimal experience and the requirements needed. How to collate it, analyse it and ensure it is distributed and used across the organisation.
The role of the CX leader is multi-faceted. Successful CX leaders will be Execs that are savvy, get things done, are outcome oriented with curiosity and the tenacity to keep learning.