[MUSIC] So welcome back. Whether you are in a CX role or a branding role, in the last class we talked about the importance of understanding the roles, responsibilities and success measures for your counterparts in the other function. In this class, we'll dive down into customer experience profiles. In 2017, I did research, using job descriptions, so almost 300 different jobs descriptions which revealed how companies have a hugely variable interpretation of the customer experience function. Job descriptions are very revealing because they tell you what the company aspires for in the customer experience role. What kind of customer-experienced problems need to be solved in the company. But also job descriptions provide background to the experience expectations of the candidate as well as how the role fits in to the organization. In the course syllabus you'll see a link to the article. The results of the research was surprising and somewhat disappointing, frankly. I came up with three different categories of the customer experience roles and the customer experience structure into which they would fit. First, there were about one-third of the job descriptions among the 280-something that I looked through. About one-third of the job descriptions, which described a job that really had little to do with customer experience. Even though the title was customer experience manager or director or supervisor, the role was very operational or tactical or it wasn't oriented towards systematically assessing or improving customer experience in any clear way. For example, some of the customer experience management roles were actually greeters that would welcome customers into the showroom and into the car showroom. Or sometimes they were managing the support center, the customer support center, not in terms of improving the customer experience but really around operations and operational effectiveness. So it was around optimizing the effectiveness of the call center, not so much to improve the customer experience. In a very loose definition of customer experience they certainly interface with customers. However, this tended to be one-off interactions with the customers and more about optimizing customer interaction and lowering costs. Again, nothing systematic about customer experience. So the second category of job descriptions were what I would call, there was a little bit more than a quarter, were what I called lost at sea roles. So the job description was kind of lost at sea, they gave a good overview of a role that involved many different activities such as designing and maintaining the website or others running email campaigns, loyalty campaigns. Or conducting sales training, but in addition someone clearly had added a number of customer experience type sounding terms, such as, running design thinking workshops or improving customer experience metrics. These additional tasks seemed artificial or almost bolted on. There are no explanations of how the very complete role which was already very complicated and complete, was going to adopt these new ways of working from a customer experience perspective. The required background among these roles in the job description also failed to incorporate the appropriate training or experience to conduct workshops. So if you're going to conduct a design thinking workshop, they didn't ask that the person had experience conducting design thinking workshops. It was really just about, just bolted on ideas for how to inject customer experience into the role. Now, you might say that your team or your company has a much better perspective on the customer experience role in its scope. In fact my research shows that, about a little more than a third of the job descriptions that I looked at were in fact pretty well described in terms of customer experience. The activities and the job description clearly demonstrated a more complete focus on customer experience in terms of activities and the expected deliverables. In general, these job descriptions included these activities and responsibilities, which are very relevant for successful ECX teams. For example, they included a focus on metrics, and measuring the impact of the customer experience role. There are also, you can see from the job description, part of a larger customer experience effort and we're obviously very transversal and focused. These job descriptions were very encouraging. This means that at least one-third of the job descriptions out there are recognizing a customer experience a discrete function and an important function within an organization. Now remember, that there are many problems with the ways that these job descriptions were written and we'll cover these in other classes. But some of the key take aways from this research are number one, there's a high degree of diversity in the interpretation of the customer experience role. And much of the diversity in the interpretation is because they're focused, the customer experience role is focused on the wrong things or focused way too narrowly. And it will lead to customer experience efforts that will make a little or no impact on the overall customer experience. And even among the more correct customer experience roles, there is still a lot of variability in how they describe the customer experience role and how the customer experience activities fit into the organization. Are you confused? I am, too. Well, let's clarify a little bit more about the best ways of thinking about customer experience in the next classes, and we'll explore this a little bit more later. [MUSIC]
