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How to Become the VP of Customer Experience
Sep 2, 2004
I occasionally get asked how one should go about becoming a customer experience practitioner. Which universities teach customer experience management? Should they take a master's degree course in usability, information architecture, or a related field?
I can only answer from experience: most of the people running the top websites we've worked with do not have a degree in usability, human factors, or any related field. Creative Good has relationships with the site owners of over 100 of the top sites on the web - as I write this, I can't think of a single owner who holds such a degree.
So, here are my steps for becoming the VP of Customer Experience in your organization:
1. Don't leave the company to get a degree in usability or human factors. Instead, start your customer experience career in the organization where you are, in your current position.
2. Learn your company's business, top to bottom. An MBA might help, but plain old common sense and smarts are a lot more valuable. Learn the company's strategic challenges, competitive environment, and prospects for growth. Form a hypothesis about where customer experience improvement could make the most impact.
3. Learn who the customers are - or at least who the stakeholders consider them to be. In particular, think about which customer segment is best to focus on, in order to create the biggest impact through customer experience. Do this by interviewing the marketers, product developers, and other stakeholders who have ideas (and previous research) about which customer types they're selling to. Be aware of inconsistency; different stakeholders often have different ideas about who the customers are.
4. Drum up support for customer experience work within the organization. Find stakeholders who care about raising business metrics; find peers who want the organization to be more customer-centered; find junior employees who want to get experience in this sort of work. Your interviews in step 3 can help.
5. Conduct listening labs in order to view customers using the service in a non-directed environment. Invite as many stakeholders as you can; the more attendees, the more impact these labs (and the ad-hoc team) will have. Your observer-invite list comes from step 4.
6. Form an ad-hoc team from the stakeholders who attended the labs and want to do more. Hold biweekly meetings (some could come after informal labs) to assemble analyses, todo lists, and "starting point" metrics to show where the company's service (or website, product, etc.) stands today.
7. Embark on a "skunk works" project with this team to improve one small aspect of the service. Make sure it's measurable, tied to a business metric, and that you have the starting point metric with which to compare the end result.
8. Based on listening lab results, suggest appropriate changes to the decision makers - the people who can get changes pushed through the site or service. Hint: If they were at the labs, your chances of success increase tenfold; they may, in fact, already be working on the fix to the problem they observed at the labs. If the stakeholder didn't attend the listening labs, don't expect much help.
9. Measure the results of this initial project by monitoring the target metric in the biweekly meetings after the project finishes. If it shows a significant rise (as it should), estimate the value to the business. Prepare to present your findings.
10. Call a meeting of stakeholders, executives, and the ad-hoc team. Show the attendees (a) the measurable business results of the project, (b) the steps you took to attain them, and (c) why the company should invest in doing more customer experience work in the future. Remember to lead with the business results; that's the point of the project.
Now, I won't guarantee that after step 10 you'll instantly be sitting in the corner office with "VP, Customer Experience" on your polished-brass nameplate. Some of our clients have made that happen, after a customer experience project or two; a couple have even become the site owner; but I'll admit that such a quick transformation is rare.
What I can guarantee is that if you form an ad-hoc team, and conduct one successful project (however small) and publicize it, the organization will want to invest more in customer experience. And that can only benefit you, the other team members, the customer, and the company as a whole.
Hi Mark,
Great Ideas! (even though I have a degree in Human Factors)
My question/comment is this: The process you outline seems great for a smaller sized company with a website and one service site, but I work for a company with over 5,000 employees and not 1, but 5 customer sites plus at least a dozen internal applications (that I've seen so far) all of which have a different team working on them. So... how can we apply this process to a larger company?
A global vision to include all the applications seems too broad-based. Including key stakeholders from each division would be nearly impossible. And going application by application (what we are doing now) seems too slow. Any suggestions?
Jennifer - Certainly you have to operate within a reasonable scope. Including all applications in your first project might be a little too ambitious.
Even in a larger firm, I'd suggest using the process outlined in the column; as for "where to start," start with a smaller project that will give you a good win to start off. Don't underestimate the impact of a day of listening labs on your managers and peers.
Yes, there are many people in UE roles that do not have a degree in Library Science, Human Factors, HCI, etc., but most companies looking for a User Experience person *today* are requiring applicants to have one of these degrees.
Can anyone recommend a good HCI (from a distance) program?
I've also been wondering about getting an HCI degree. I can rationalize a decision either way (continue on with ad-hoc learning or pursue a formal degree). If there are in fact distance programs, that'd be one thing. However, I just can't see a practical path to taking the time for a full Master's.
Brian & Chris - I'm studying a distance Human Factors Masters that can be started at a lower level (and I think some classes can be taken independently): http://www.humanfactors.uq.edu.au/
Nice, so to follow your logic, why go to college at all? Why not get a job in the service industry, like say as waiter or car mechanic. Connecting with customers is much better than a silly little piece of paper anyway. Right? And think of the $ you will save!
Ok, enough of that, I propose that an epistemological (www.dictionary.com) view of what you understand in relation to design will get you further in your career than understanding the ins an out of your current employer. If you cannot back up what you think and propose with research and facts that answer the “why” of what you do, you will be no better than Jessie James Garrett (a positivist (www.dictionary.com) who bases his views strictly on what he observes and nothing deeper) than you may be able to create some smoke and mirrors to the uninformed in your company, but your work will not stand the test of time.
I say this because I have been in the interaction design industry for 14 years and am currently in a masters degree program, while working full time. I highly recommend this path, working and school at the same time, because you can apply what you learn on a daily basis, not just learn the theories and then practice when you are done.
Thanks Donna. That's very helpful.
I would have to agree with Brooks P on this one, although less brashly.
I have been on both sides: working in UE roles with and without a degree.
Without my degree, while most clients, etc. assumed I had a degree, my co-workers knew I did not and that worked against me. It was hard to prove myself. I wasn't as respected as those with degrees. All I had to back up my design rationale were my instincts, unless I could perform testing.
Now that I have my degree, I know that a lot of my earlier insticts may have been correct and I also know why and where to cite facts regarding those decisions. I can now make better, informed decisions and have great dicussion and debates with fellow UEs (not to mention command a better salary).
Another great article, Mark. I agree that this is a great approach to begin this type of work in your company as it’s what I’m trying to do now. I can see that some expertise in human factors would certainly be beneficial especially when you need to back a hypothesis with theory and facts.
However, I think a lot of this stuff is somewhat intuitive to some people. While I may not be able to lecture on human factors, I can experience something or witness something and 'feel' that it's not right. When I sit with a call rep and listen to a customer phone call, the things that don't go well are sometime subtle but you know them when you hear them. It really takes a conscious effort to listen to yourself and question the parts that make you feel uneasy. Often simply looking in from the outside enables us to do that. Veteran call center supervisors w/ 5+ years are too immersed in the day-to-day activities to see it from the customer’s perspective. Often they are looking at managing/coaching associates on metrics that have nothing to do with actually servicing the customer’s needs.