CX Leadership
Customer experience leadership
What exactly makes a successful customer experience leader? Customer experience leaders come in all shapes and sizes, and because customer experience is more of an art than a science, you can bet that there are a huge variety of approaches out there to customer strategy.
Our award-winning approach to customer experience has been cultivated over the last ten years, and we know that it gets results.
We combine our tried and tested processes with empathic and influential key stakeholder management to ensure that not only does your organisation have the CX strategy that it needs in place, your senior leaders from other areas of the business will understand the importance of the strategy and what they can do to help it succeed.
Our solution to customer experience leaders comes in two forms – you can either request ad-hoc leadership support from Think Wow, or if you want significant growth and progress swiftly and feel like you want someone who knows your business inside and out, we can support you with a fully trained, Think Wow approved, ready to hit the ground running, full time CX leader situated within your business 5 days a week.
Customer experience professionals are hard to find, so if you’ve identified a need to improve customer loyalty, work on your customer journey, or even if you’re not sure exactly what the focus should be but you know you your customer satisfaction could be better – why not let us take the stress out of finding the right customer experience leaders for your business?
Did you know 77% of corporations experienced leadership gaps in 2021?
Still on the fence about CX leadership?
Employees typically seek jobs at companies that have leadership development, but companies usually only want to spend the sort of money that senior leadership roles command if they know that they are hiring a fully-functioning, well trained, and experienced leader.
In addition to this, almost 80 % of businesses report that leadership is lacking, and while that is a big number it should not come as a surprise given that 10,000 Baby Boomers retire every single day.
Sourcing candidates with proven skillsets who can hit the ground running and create a well researched, market leading customer experience strategy that helps you reach your organisational objectives doesn’t have to be hard. We can help you plug your skills gap, and support you in the design, implementation and ongoing success of your strategy.
In fact, did you know that according to Harvard Business Review 84% of businesses actively working on their customer experience report an increase in revenue? Or that 96% of customers say that customer service is important in their choice of brand?
We often hear ‘But the customer experience is everyone’s responsibility’ which is absolutely correct. The main issue with this approach is that by making it everyone’s responsibility equally, without one person designated to prioritise the customer experience above all else, you risk it becoming no one’s responsibility at all.
A marketing director will always need to prioritise marketing strategy, a sales leader will always need to prioritise sales and so on… having one clear champion whose job is to keep up to date with customer experience innovation and help the rest of the business to embed any improvements to your customer journey is the only surefire way to ensure your customer experience keeps up with changing customer needs.
Customer experience leaders need to be able to understand customers and interpret their needs to the rest of the business in such a way that they create natural and enthusiastic CX champions at every level.
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Still need convincing? Okay, here goes!
On average it takes 36-42 days to hire a customer experience leader. It takes on average 12 – 14 weeks for them to be fully productive and that’s before you even consider the cost of the empty vacancy, the time and cost spent on hiring and ongoing training and development of your new recruit.
We help you fill your skills gap with an experienced and fully trained customer experience leader who knows how to use customer data, customer journey mapping, and wider business strategy to ensure your organisation hits your customer goals. We source, train and support your CX leader with regular training sessions, and ongoing personal development, keeping them up to date with changing CX trends and innovation, but they remain dedicated to your business.
We use our extensive knowledge of processes and stakeholder management to help them create a strategy that’s tailored to your organisation, but rooted in our award-winning CX approach. With our outsourced customer experience leaders, we even take care of payroll, holidays, sickness, and finding a replacement should your leader ever decide to move on.
If you aren’t quite ready for a full time customer experience leader we can still offer ad-hoc customer leadership to help you reach your goals, so if you’re ready to join the leading companies around the world, up your customer experience game, and increase customer retention get in touch today.
What happens once you’re ready for outsourced customer experience leadership?
We’ll take some time to get to know your business, understand your culture, values and wider organisational objectives, and review any customer challenges you are currently facing. We’ll conduct a workload assessment to help you decide whether you need ad-hoc support or a full-time outsourced member of staff and then we work with you to find the perfect candidate.
All our recruits undergo a rigorous selection process designed to ensure they will fit well with your culture and be the natural customer champion your business needs. We induct and train them in our award-winning approach to CX design but take care to encourage innovation and creative thinking in all of our team members as well as helping them to identify any cost savings they can pass on to you with improved operational efficiencies or software solutions.
We take care of the day-to-day management of your customer experience leaders, but they are situated within your working environment, collaborating with your team members to help you deliver exceptional customer experiences and delight customers, giving you the ultimate competitive advantage.
We’ll even work with your leader to represent your business as a keynote speaker, helping to establish them as an industry expert on your behalf.
Still have questions? Check out our FAQs:
How does an outsourced Customer Experience Leader work with other senior executives to achieve a customer centric culture?
We train our leaders to work collaboratively with sales operations, marketing leaders and any other c-level executives to understand their goals, their challenges, and help them to find solutions that complement the CX strategy.
It’s essential to find a customer experience leader who not only helps to drive improved customer loyalty, but who is capable of winning over internal hearts and minds. To be a successful customer experience leader you also need to be an exceptional stakeholder manager, empathic and thoughtful colleague and have the right skills to aid revenue growth by increasing the lifetime value of a customer. If any one of those elements is missing, then the initiative could fail. We recognise this and work with our leaders on an ongoing basis to support them to motivate employees, retain customers and improve customer experiences.
Why shouldn't we just hire our own Chief Customer Officer?
That’s an excellent question and if you have any doubts that going down the outsourced CX leader route is the right fit for you, then it may not be. It could be that you’d rather we support you with the recruitment of an experienced CX leader or Chief Customer Officer, and then let you manage their day to day, their holiday, sickness and ongoing personal development.
We can support you with that as much or as little as you need.
The theory is that a customer who scores you 6 or less is likely to be a brand detractor, out there negatively talking about your brand and not someone who is likely to recommend you to others.
7-8 they are considered passives. They don’t feel strongly enough about their experience either way to even talk about you.
9 and 10 means that they are promoters. They were so pleased with their experience with you that they will be out there telling everyone they meet just how great you are, and drumming up business for you based on their customer service feedback.
You need to make sure that as many key team members as possible are empowered to help with the project, that they see the value in any culture change, and that they know how important they are to the success of the overall transformation. Bringing your team along and involving them in the process is a tried and tested way to drive engagement and you can’t do that with a team who are disengaged or feeling undervalued. That’s why we recommend the cultural assessment is one of the first stages to the project.
For some, you might need to present a business case for the project, for others having a clear vision of what great cx looks like will be enough to guide them.
How will our outsourced CX leader solve customer problems in a way that's in line with our brand?
We know the huge importance of creating a clearly defined brand. Customers crave trust and consistency, and a well thought out brand strategy can help with both. We want our services to complement your existing brand, so we work with you to ensure we really understand your brand promise, your values and how you want to be thought of and recognised by your target market.
Whilst we manage your outsourced CX leader, we do it with your full collaboration, so you can be sure we will only ever build a customer strategy that’s in line with your customer expectations and enhances your brand reputation.
Will our outsourced leader manage CX metrics, the survey process and any advanced analytics?
Absolutely! We have plenty of experience in creating feedback strategies that collect, analyse and respond to the right customer insights. We use our combined industry knowledge to ensure that your business asks the right questions, in the right way to inspire customer confidence.
We know that the key to a great feedback strategy or any market research is that it keeps the customer at the heart of it, always making them feel valued and making it as easy as possible for them to feedback conveniently. Your CX professional can then interpret that information and use it to drive employee engagement and the overall customer centric culture.
How does outsourcing help us deliver consistently exceptional experiences?
We use our tried and tested, award winning CX strategies to underpin the CX initiatives your outsourced leader implements. Our processes and strategic approach are all designed with three core customer experience design principles – Consistency, making it easy and communicating clearly.
You can feel confident that our clear focus on customer centricity, business improvement and keeping your own organisations core values at the heart of our decision making will enable our CX leaders to support your organisation in achieving both it’s short and long term customer goals.
What sort of services can I outsource to Think Wow?
CX management is a vast area, which can include anything from proactive complaint management, insight collation and customer success strategy, all the way through to influencing stakeholders, and using customer feedback to influence changes to the customer journey.
Essentially if it helps drive increased customer loyalty one of our then we can help you take care of it though a highly trained and supported customer experience specialist.
How do you find the best CX professionals?
We have an extensive network, with over 50,000 contacts worldwide on LinkedIn. We have been active members of the customer experience network for some time now, and engage regularly with thought leaders on exciting and innovative CX topics ranging from regulated areas such as financial services, to retail and e-commerce. As a result we know a lot of highly reputable individuals.
In addition to this, we run the Think Wow academy, a recruitment and training solution that grows top CX talent from the ground up, helping individuals to gain valuable customer experience leadership skills, take secondments in well known businesses and get ready to transition to full time senior leaders.
