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, to keep fine-tuning the customer’s experience. Since no business can compete effectively without a great customer experience. 

The role of a customer experience (CX) specialist is to ensure that the team 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.

Today, customer experience specialists need to track a complex buyer journey across online and offline platforms, 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 experiences 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 experiences 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 teams to find solutions for the same.

Essential Skills Of A Customer Experience (CX) Specialist

1. 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.

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 spot not just red-flag breaks in CX that need immediate fixing, but also opportunities to build ever stronger experiences that can deliver a real competitive advantage.

4. Data management and analytics : Everything companies learn about customers’ journeys is documented in the 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 operations 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.

Job Description: Key Responsibilities

• 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