Our research shows that most customer experience programs – up to 95% — fail to make a meaningful difference in terms of business growth or financial outcomes. Indeed, the main output of many teams is sets of reports and scorecards. It’s not enough.

Here are the top five skills we believe are necessary for strategic alignment and financial success:

1. Analytical skills. Consider this a core competency. We observe that many NPS team members lack basic knowledge of statistics. We recommend formal training, either in the classroom or online. Analytics go well beyond surveys. Teams need to be able to understand the relationships between trends in survey, operational, and financial data.

    

2. Financial acumen. The overall CX leader, at the very least, needs to have reasonably deep financial skills. They need to be able to confidently predict the relationship between operational performance, CX metric performance, and the financial results they want to improve.
3. Collaborative Reputation. Customer experience team members need to be able to drive improvement work that crosses organizational boundaries. In B2B, for example, we believe your very largest customers should each have their own improvement plan, managed by a CX team member.
4. Persuasive Nature. NPS team members rarely work on their own. They often need to persuade other people to take customer-centric actions. The only ways we have of getting others to take action are by what we say and what we write. We need to be good at both. In addition to formal training on how to make effective presentations, we suggest making the subject an occasional focus for team meetings.

5. NPS Certified. Formal NPS training confers the skill set and perspectives critical to thoughtfully managing an effective program. We respectfully submit that the Net Promoter Masterclass course is the place to go.

This list covers understanding customer-related data, determining its financial impact, driving improvements and communicating change. We believe these skills are essential to the majority of CX work.

A strong governance and accountability approach can help carry to your program from its beginning to more advanced operations and impact. Be sure your governance team understands that its remit includes continuing engagement with an evolving program over the long haul. Leverage your team to help navigate the challenges of building the data assets you’ll need to practically align your CX efforts to company strategy and outcomes. To get there, download our guide, take our comprehensive training course, or read about the future of NPS.