The website http://juggle.wikia.com/wiki/Top_40_Jugglers has readers vote for the best juggler in the world. For the past two years, the winner has been Ofek Snir from Israel. If you are bored, you can search him and see his amazing ability.
In looking up the best jugglers, I found that June 17th is Jugglers Day. This year, October 3rd is CX Day, but I am starting to wonder if it should be moved to June 17th given all of the juggling CX professionals must perform on a daily basis. I would argue, though, that CX professionals are some of the best jugglers in the world today. In many organizations, CX professionals have to fight internal barriers of key functional heads or information users who marginalize the role of the CX professional. They have to fight for credibility and strategic importance. All the while, they have to juggle all of the key, necessary components to create a successful and impactful CX program.
Last week at the 2017 CXPA Insight Exchange, we talked to a number of CX professionals about all the areas on which they are focusing. You can see the eight areas that most CX professionals today are trying to juggle in their role in the picture to the right. If you can’t see it, the eight areas are Communication, Insights, Action, Impact, Strategy, Culture, Resources and Technology.
Walker has been around for almost 80 years and has been a leader in the area of CX consulting for almost two decades. Over that time, we have identified these eight areas as critical to the success of any CX program. The icon on the left illustrates the six areas that are key to success – plus technology and communication, which surround those six areas as boosters that strengthen and enhance the other six.
In our booth, we gave CX professionals three stickers and they put the stickers on the three areas that are their biggest challenge right now. Taking Action was the biggest challenge for most CX professionals, by far. This is something we hear a lot: Far too often, information that could create real and lasting change in an organization is not fully used and acted upon. This is part of the reason CX professionals can be marginalized and have to fight to get Resources, which was another top vote-getter. This also is why Impact was mentioned quite often as a top challenge; if information is not being Acted upon, it is not going to have the desired Impact. We have a webcast on taking action if you would like to listen to it; you can check it out here.
The other two areas with a lot of votes were Culture and Technology. Even with all of the technology providers today, many CX professionals are still struggling in this area. This tells me the issue is not the technology platform itself but how the technology is being used and implemented in the organization – which is probably dovetailing with Action. We also did a webcast on Technology which you can listen to here.
Culture is an area where we have seen significant focus over the past several years. Organizations are realizing CX cannot be truly performed in a vacuum but must become part of the fabric of the organization. For some tips on creating a CX-focused culture, guess what? We have a webcast on that as well.
CX professionals have a lot they are trying to juggle today and we all can’t be Ofek Snir. We must prioritize and focus on key areas and work to improve areas of weaknesses while still maintaining all of the other areas. If you would like to see where you stand on these different areas and see your level of maturity based on our new maturity model, you can sign up for the survey here and you will get a free report showing areas of strength and weakness along with how you stack up compared to others.
