In praise of the non-linear CX career path

It could be the perfect icebreaker for anyone who works in a customer experience (CX) role when they’re meeting a peer for the first time: “So, how did you end up doing this?”

The question assumes that most business professionals don’t start off in a CX-specific role. Instead, there is usually a series of previous jobs where they picked up skills and experience that they currently apply in helping customers today.

TJ Stein is a good example. He’s currently the head of customer care at IPSY, which offers a suite of beauty subscriptions that help start unite brands, creators and consumers all together through a single platform. But when he was younger and still in school, Stein admits he was looking for cash to spend on the weekends, which is how he got a job working at a golf course in Marsh Creek.

“It basically required me to really understand the service experience from a ground floor level,” Stein said during a session at a virtual CX event hosted by Instant Teams earlier this week. “You were essentially taking care of these folks making sure that they’re comfortable. You got to know their names, you got to know their preferences.”

Stein still doesn’t even play golf, but he looks back on that job as a formative role for the work he does today.

For Ethan Peters, the path to a CX careers feels even less linear. Though he now serves as senior director of the auto program at Liberty Mutual Insurance in Boston, Mass., Peters spent more than 20 years in the Air Force, where he worked in satellite wideband communications maintenance. Even there, however, the importance of CX become crystal clear.

“No matter what you’re doing, experience is what people remember when our systems fail, whether that’s the systems that our people (in the Air Force) were using, or the systems that our customers are using,” he said. “What they’re going to remember is what they felt like when they tried to interact with whatever it is that we’re providing for them.”

Luis Carillo seems the least likely to become a CX professional. He began his career as a credit risk analyst, and was focused on moving up in the world of financial planning and analysis when he was tasked with developing training curriculum for those in similar jobs.

Over time, he discovered was that coaching people using the curriculum provided the greatest fulfillment, which led to greater curiosity about what makes people feel good about the products and services they’re using.

“Being a trainer was a painful experience at the time, but now that I look back at it, it was  probably the best thing that happened to me,” said Carillo, who is now a CX strategic advisor at Vox Wins and has been VP of CX at RYZE.

Of course, truly thriving in a CX career involves building on those formative experiences and progressively adding more domain expertise. Stein later worked in a contact center role with stringent service level agreements (SLA), for example, but he also later moved in the direct to consumer (DTC) space at MeUndies.

“While my operational capacity shifted and was minimized, my scope in terms of learning and understanding of about what makes for a really differentiating customer experience was just profoundly different,” he said.

Similarly, Peters suggested those working in operational roles may be better suited to working in CX than expected.

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“In ops you learn to measure what matters, and try to run reliable systems,” he said. “That translates really well into consistent CX. It’s not about getting it right occasionally, or about just the superstars being really good at providing that experience. It’s about measuring whether or not you’re making a difference in the systems that you’re running to helping promote quality CX.”

Carillo said working in finance has also helped him apply the numbers to CX impact, such as how changes in an experience affects areas such as revenue and retention.

“I can see it with executives, where I can talk about anything from cost per contact, margin, impact and performance modeling, but I can also empathize with the frontline agents,” he said. “Being a numbers guy has provided me credibility over the years, but being a people person gives me perspective.”

Taking a non-linear path to a CX career also provides another secret weapon, Stein said: context switching.

“This morning I’m looking at a single customer case, and then later today, we’re going to have a conversation about a two to three year roadmap,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to zoom in and zoom out without breaking a sweat.”

All sessions from Instant Teams’ virtual CX event are available on demand to registered users.