How to Be a Better Customer Experience Practitioner

Sep 16, 2004

A couple of weeks back I wrote the column, How to Become the VP of Customer Experience. Several of the reader e-mails I got in response asked me where I would recommend people go for training in customer experience - especially since I advised against the standard academic route of a master's in human factors or related disciplines.

My answer is that to become a good customer experience practitioner, you should find a company that has an organization and culture that will allow you to grow into that role. Find a good operating company, or a good service firm, that invests in customer experience.

This is one reason I include job posts in the Good Experience newsletter; these are companies that invest in and reward customer experience champions, and for readers, it's an excellent way to stay on the track toward becoming a better practitioner. This week, for example, we have job posts from three operating companies (A&E, PayPal, and The Motley Fool), and a service firm (Cooper, founded by the legendary interaction designer Alan Cooper) that are making just such an investment.

In addition to working at the right place, I'd recommend some of the resources - call me biased - that have run in this newsletter in recent months. Here are some tips on becoming a better customer experience practitioner with some links to recent columns.

1. Learn how to work within the organization. As I wrote in the column listed below, "Changing the organization is the most difficult and most important part of user experience work."

The Most Important User Experience Method (June 20, 2003)

2. Be a good listener. Much of your success will come from the knowledge you gain from both coworkers and customers of your company's products.

Listening With Respect (September 9, 2004)

3. Empathize with the customer. Anyone who doesn't have this natural tendency and skill is perhaps better off working on issues that don't affect customers. Empathy is perhaps the single most important trait for a CE practitioner to have.

Leonardo da Vinci, Disciple of Experience (April 18, 2003)

4. Try conducting user research in a more open-ended style in which the customer leads the interaction, and you get a more holistic view of the customer's experience with the company. In four words, "Don't write tasks beforehand."

Four Words to Improve User Research (October 1, 2003)

5. Remember the ultimate measure of your work, at least according to your boss: measurable business results. Don't get obsessed with "time on task" or "success rate"; instead, take a sharp view of how your work benefits the company overall.

The ROSE framework (Nov. 17, 2003)

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