Customer experience (CX) teams: What you need to know

Excellent customer experience (CX) is key to any company's success. 

As customers become increasingly demanding, businesses respond to their needs by leveraging numerous CX instruments. The power behind CX improvement is a strong customer experience team.

The customer experience team is a group of professionals who interact with customers, analyze their feedback, and help implement this insight in various aspects of the company's operation.

Let's take a closer look at what a CX team is and how it helps organizations stay on top of their game.

A CX team analyzes customer feedback and shares insights with other departments, including sales, marketing, HR, accounting, and product design.

This team aims to improve customer experience by helping the organization turn customer feedback into actionable tactics.

The team can also be responsible for identifying trends through consumer and market research, measuring KPIs, and developing customer experience strategies.

The CX team is responsible for providing information that other departments need to improve strategies, products, and services.

Duties of a CX team can include:

• Developing the customer experience strategy

• Managing customer feedback program

• Managing a VoC (voice of the customer) program

• Monitoring customer experience metrics

• Conducting customer research

• Embedding customer experience into the company culture

• Leveraging CX-related technology and tools

• Working closely with UX and product teams to ensure cohesive product experiences

Depending on the organization's size and its focus on customer experience, the team can consist of just a few people with multiple responsibilities. Alternatively, it can be a large CX department where each employee has a highly specialized role.   

When building a CX team for your business, you need to define the roles of its members. Specialists who are part of a small CX team have to be prepared to wear multiple hats.  

CX leader

The CX leader is the key member of the customer experience team. They are also known as:

• Chief customer officer (CCO)

• Customer experience officer (CXO)

• VP of CX

• CCO of CX

This specialist: 

• Oversees the customer experience team

• Manages customer experience analytics

• Reviews marketing campaigns

• Handles new technologies

• Sets priorities

Sometimes, the leader hands some aspects of this role to a CX manager. They implement the CX leader's guidance to streamline the CX team's activities and delegate relevant tasks to other team members.

The VoC program manager is responsible for connecting and engaging with customers at the different stages of the customer journey. These specialists collect customer feedback and discover customer behavior patterns.

They aim to understand why the customer is making certain decisions and share this information with the rest of the team. The intelligence these professionals generate can help the company improve digital marketing strategies and general business outcomes.  

Experience design specialist

This professional is responsible for design thinking within the CX team. They study how customers interact with the company's products and services and analyze their experience. 

The results can improve product design, and experienced design specialists can work with UX designers to enhance CX.

Data analyst

The key goal of the CX team is to analyze customer experience data and put it in a form that helps the rest of the department improve the company's bottom line. 

CX team analysts study business requirements and analyze customer feedback, profile, and behavior data in a specific context. These steps help the organization make relevant changes.

Organizations with sufficient resources may also invest in a customer advisory board. This group of customers can test products or services and provide valuable feedback regularly. This approach helps the CX team gain valuable audience insights.

To ensure the success and smooth operation of your CX team, team members should have a specific set of skills, including:

Leadership

CX team members often have leading roles in product and service improvement. Leadership skills are integral to the team's success, especially if it consists of just one or two professionals. It also comes especially handy when helping to shape the company culture and direct company decisions with data.

Market research skills

These skills include: 

• Survey research

• Questionnaire creation

• Metrics monitoring

• Statistics

• Data collection methods

• Interviewing methods

• Reporting

Analytical thinking

All members of the CX team should have analytical, observational, and critical thinking abilities to gain insight from customer feedback and other communication sources.

Problem-solving skills

Your CX team should have excellent communication, collaboration, and analytical skills. They should be able to solve teamwork, data gathering, analytics, and decision-making issues.

An eye for design 

CX team members should directly connect to the company’s product design and UX teams. A clear understanding of the product's research and the resulting design enables a smooth product transition. 

It can also supplement CX research to gather and process information to improve it. Product design and research should always be at the forefront when analyzing feedback.

Ability to work with others

CX team members have to communicate with many other departments, including sales, marketing, UX, and design. That's why they should have excellent team communication skills and relationship-building abilities.

Finding members for a small CX team can be challenging since they need multiple skill sets. If your team is small, stress the importance of communication and collaboration with other departments.

The CX leader liaisons with accounting, product design, marketing, sales, and HR teams. Each department can help monitor CX metrics and evaluate the strategy's success.

To build a successful customer experience team, your preliminary work includes:

• Determining customer experience goals and aligning them with business goals

• Identifying feedback methods 

• Researching relevant CX technologies

• Figuring out which other departments can help your CX team achieve its targets

Collaborating with other departments is integral to the success of the CX team. That's why you need to educate your entire workforce about CX goals and their importance to the company's bottom line.

Determine the budget

The size of your budget dictates the CX team’s size, so plan your budget according to business goals and priorities. Prioritize which objectives you want to achieve with the available budget quarterly. This can prevent you from inflating the budget. It’s also a great way to communicate clear goals to the team.

Identify the CX team structure

If you are just starting, your CX team is likely to be small, with one employee juggling numerous responsibilities. Some team members could also be working for other departments and dedicating part of their time to CX duties, like UX researchers and product managers.

A startup's CX team may consist of a CX leader who handles feedback data analytics and shares it with the rest of the department. Each department can have a representative who collaborates with the CX leader to achieve mutual goals.

A small company's CX team may have a CX leader, a data analyst, and a VoC program expert. 

As the business grows and CX needs multiply, you can add more players to the CX team, including UX experts, UI managers, customer support experts, and many more.

Set up CX processes

You need to determine the best CX practices and processes for the new team to achieve top results. They can include:

• Collecting reviews and feedback 

• Analyzing reviews and feedback 

• Data reporting

• Metric setting and measurement schedules

Besides collecting, analyzing, and reporting, your CX team can also review the implementation of gathered insight into company operations. This measures the performance of other departments and provides new data for the CX team's operations.  

Build the tech stack

CX teams succeed by using numerous tools that automate the feedback-gathering and analysis process. These tools can include:

• Survey and data collection tools

• Analytics software

• Project management tools

• Reporting tools

You need to identify which tools fit your budget and ensure their smooth integration into the current tech stack. 

If you have a small CX team, high-quality tools are crucial. These instruments take over manual work and give your CX leader more time to focus on sourcing valuable insights.

If customers are the driving force behind your company's revenue, you’re highly likely to benefit from building a customer experience team.

Today, only around 56% of B2C companies have CX teams. However, the rising importance of customer experience is leading more businesses to invest in this department.

Focusing on customer experience doesn't just help you improve the bottom line. It can turn you into a strong industry player with excellent growth and development outlook.

A good CX team comprises specialists with the right skill sets, including communication, leadership, problem-solving, analytics, research, and design. 

You don't need a large CX team to achieve success. Some companies only have one or two CX team members who wear many hats. 

The key component of a successful CX team is company support. The business should also act on and pay attention to the data and suggestions the team recommends.

The CX leader is a customer experience expert who identifies goals, delegates responsibilities, and collaborates with other company executives.