The CX habit that Forrester says will define customer-obsessed leaders
Katy Tynan’s assignment for those attending her session at CX North America was a simple one: make a paper airplane. The only constraint? She gave the audience only 30 seconds to complete it.
Forrester’s VP and principal analyst for employee experience and the future of work didn’t sit on the sidelines, however. She made an airplane too, and when she was done she held it up proudly. It was, she admitted, the standard “design” for paper airplanes that most of us learned at the age of 10 or younger.
She could have went on YouTube to find a more innovative design. She could have called up her son, who works as a mechanical engineer, for ideas. But no.
“I made this because I only had 30 seconds to think about new ways of doing things. I didn’t have time to come up with great smart ideas. And that is our problem right now,” she said during the conference session, which was hosted in Nashville but available virtually.
“We are talent constrained. We’re in an unprecedented situation. And we’re all working really hard,” Tynan added. “And when we’re busy we revert back to our habits. We revert back to the ways of doing things that we learned when we first came into the working world.”
In order to properly put the resources towards customer experience (CX) design that a company needs, in other words, Tynan suggested trying to staff up is not the answer. In fact, she presented data that showed the time to hire for those in creative and design roles is among the longest of any in a typical organization.
Introducing the ‘No Jobs” model
Instead, Tynan advised the CX North America crowd to “unbundle” the CX tasks and responsibilities that would be part a single person’s job description and look at alternative ways to get the necessary skills and have the work done. She called this Forrester’s “No Jobs” model.
This might mean contracting CX work out to outsourcers or freelancers, for instance. In other cases automation could perform the work that once required a human being to be put on the payroll. There could even be existing team members who really understand the business needs and requirements to move CX forward.
Tynan’s session was called “What customer-obsessed leaders do differently,” and this represented the answer to the question the title proposed.
“This is your new habit,” she said. “There’s a lot of relationship building (needed) here.”
It’s worth noting that Tynan was also hosting a session at the event dubbed “Partnership is the new Leadership,” which also explored cross-functional approaches to executing a CX strategy.
I don’t think developing alliances with stakeholders in other departments is at all new to the most successful CX leaders. However Tynan’s presentation provided a stark reminder of how current economic and labor market challenges may make it increasingly difficult to build out a dedicated CX team.
It not be about recruiting and developing full-time CX talent at all right now. It’s not about making CX a departmental “job.”
Success is looking more like jumping out of an airplane – paper or otherwise – and figuring out how to build your parachute on the way down.
