The 10 most on demand customer experience manager skills

Definition of customer experience

Customer experience refers to all the emotions and feelings felt by a customer before, during and after the purchase of a product or service. It is the result of all the interactions a customer may have with the brand or company.

Customer experience is, therefore, the complex result of heterogeneous elements and factors involved in the customer journey (advertising, point-of-sale environment, sales representative relationship, user experience, customer support, etc.). The nature and components of the customer experience can vary greatly depending on the field of activity and are linked to the notion of the customer journey. In some areas, the customer experience will essentially be felt at the point of sale/service, while in other areas, it can be spread out through different points of contact.

Customer experience has obviously a direct impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Customer experience can promote or destroy a brand. If you offer your customers a good experience, they will become ambassadors of your brand. On the other hand, if your company’s customer experience is disappointing, customers can turn against you, and with the extent of social networking, that bad customer experience can very quickly backfire on you. Harris Interactive found 86% of consumers stop interacting with and buying from businesses if they have a bad experience.

Customer experience can no longer be an afterthought. To succeed, it has to be at the epicenter of a brand’s DNA.

“In an age of exceptionally high consumer expectations, customer experience has emerged as the new competitive battlefield”

Jake Sorofman – Gartner

This is when organizations must assess how customers interact with their brand and implement strategies to ensure that customers enjoy optimal experiences with the brand. Gartner said that companies should “design and react to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations which leads to greater customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.”

One of the components of the CX strategies is to establish a new talent that represents the voice of the customer in the company and optimizes customer experience by differentiating it at all levels. It’s the customer experience manager

What does a customer experience manager do?

The Customer Experience Manager analyses customer journeys from a cross-channel perspective. His role is to create products and behaviors (speech, postures, etc.) that meet the requirements of customers. He is also the guarantor of the effectiveness and profitability of the optimization solutions provided for customer relations.

To create positive customer interactions, a Customer Experience Manager needs to collect all the information at his disposal to truly understand what customers are looking for. This includes mapping customer journey and collecting data on consumer satisfaction and dissatisfaction through surveys and qualitative studies, and analyses the results collected. From there, he defines the areas for improvement and proposes solutions to meet and ideally exceed customer expectations at all points of contact.

Customer experience manager required skills

To identify the required skills, we performed multiple crawls of the global online recruitment website indeed.com, downloading advertisements from the US and Canada that included the phrase “customer experience manager” whether in the title or the content. We downloaded the data published between January 2019 and January 2020, a sample of 791 customer experience manager job vacancies.

Following common text-mining procedures, we reduced the vocabulary in our documents by removing stop words (e.g., “he”, “and”, “or”), eliminating terms that occur less than 1 percent of the documents as well as irrelevant terms for the analysis, including those that are related to human resources (e.g., “salary”, “bonus”, “salary”), keeping only those that describe competencies. Also, we’ve eliminated all job descriptions where a high school diploma is the minimum degree required since those positions are usually related to customer service.

After doing all the cleaning and text mining preprocessing work, the final number of job postings we analyzed was 109. We conducted an exploratory text data analysis based on the clustering of words and phrases as well as LDA based topic modeling to extract the most salient topics. Our analysis showed top skills that are presented below by importance based on topic occurrence in documents:

1. Communication

Excellent communication skills, organized and strong problem-solving skills (97,25% of cases)
Related words: communication, detail, excellent, exceptional, interpersonal, organizational, planning, problem, problems, skills, solving, strong, verbal, written

2. Relationships

Ability to build and maintain relationships with external stakeholders and internal cross-functional team members (Services, Sales, Support, Product Development, QA, etc.) (97,25% of cases)
Related words: build, effective, effectively, external, individuals, internal and external customers, internal and external stakeholders, internal teams, level, lead, meet, partner, stakeholders, teams, stakeholders, closely, meetings, partners, functional, cross, levels, relationships, maintain, work with internal

3. Project Management

Must be an effective project manager able to handle multiple complex projects (95,41% of cases)
Related keywords: channels, manage, management, multiple, platform, project, projects, survey, tasks

4. CX Strategies

Identify improvement opportunities and develop innovative CX strategies to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention and to meet their expectations (93,58% of cases)
Related keywords: develop, drive, engagement, identify opportunities to improve, loyalty, opportunities, results, strategies, retention, strategy, satisfaction

5. Data-Driven

Ability to collect customer data from different sources (surveys, mapping customer journey, voice of the customer, etc), to analyze it using analytics tools and to convert data into insights to identify opportunities. (92,66% of cases)
Related keywords: analysis, analytics, consumer, data, design, driven, insights, journey, market, research, design, change management, management and cx, pain points, projects, research projects, market research, reporting, resources, tools

6. College Degree in Business

Bachelor’s degree in business or marketing preferred with professional experience between 2 and 10 years. (92,66% of cases)
Related keywords: bachelor, degree, field, knowledge, minimum, preferred, related, bachelor degree, combination of education, degree in business, degree in marketing, related field, required, field, degree preferred, years related, business administration, strongly preferred, relevant, required, years.

7. Performance Measurement (Metrics)

Ability to define key success metrics, set performance goals, and continually monitor key performance indicators for improvement. (89,91% of cases)
Related keywords: achieve, goals, meet, metrics, performance, indicators, quality, standards

8. Fast-Changing Environment

Ablity to adapt in a fast-paced, changing growth environment and to work independently (81,65% of cases)
Related keywords: environment, fast, fast paced, growing, growth, paced, paced environment, work independently, work environment

9. Software Knowledge

Experience using office applications and other software related to the position (e.g. Qualtrics, Medallia, SurveyMonkey, etc.) (81,65% of cases)
Related keywords: applications, basic, computer, industry, office, software, systems

10. Support Team

Train and support team members so they can provide services or products that meet or ideally exceed customer expectations. (62,39% of cases)
Related keywords: customers, provide, process, training, service, sales, members, team, support, development, staff

Top 10 skills for a CX manager

The previous chart represents the number of job descriptions where a specific customer manager skill has been mentioned. Only the top 10 skills have been presented in this blog. Other skills such as leadership, social media or passion for delivering great experiences have not been mentioned since they do not reach the top 10, however, they are still important to have to be a successful customer experience manager.