Customer Experience is an exciting and disruptive profession that is bashing down the very same barriers that the corporate world has self-embedded into its fabric for decades. Demolishing siloes, creating a customer-centric culture, and managing that transformation from old to new – with renewed, microscopic focus on the customer and employee attitudes and behaviors necessary to drive bottom-line results, there is just so much to learn!
Track and trace priority improvements using a delicate balance of flawless metrics and measurements, plug-in live and up-to-date dashboarding mechanisms and you are only just getting started! From world-class best practices in qualitative and quantitative research ecosystems, explicitly employed to gain customer insights through solicited and unsolicited customer feedback – to deploying a variety of human-centered process improvement methodologies, often at scale and ‘OVERWHELMING’ would be an appropriate adjective!
As a proud ambassador of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)™, a Customer Experience Specialist (CXS)™ and Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP)™, I am happy to share a global definition of what learning and development success looks like in this exciting field of customer experience, and through the short paragraphs of this blog post, I intend to shed some light on a tried-and-tested path to getting there.
It will not be easy but as in the case of the most meaningful achievements in your career and life, it will certainly be worth the effort when you finally tick the checkbox next to that development goal. Read on and find out how my CCXP journey was like from the beginning to the end.
The Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) exam
The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)™ was founded ten years ago in 2011 and is the premier, global, non-profit organization dedicated to the cultivation and advancement of the customer experience profession, with more than 4000 members across the globe. Having realized the need for customer experience professionals to demonstrate high levels of proficiency and experience in the customer experience discipline, established the Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP)™ program in 2014.
Today, there are approximately 1200 Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP)™’s around the globe and the CCXP credential is highly sought after with customer-centric brands like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft introducing it as a preferred requirement in their recruitment processes for relevant positions.
The Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP)™ program is open to the public, and both CXPA members and non-members can apply. Eligibility requires a bachelors degree and three years of full-time CX work with primary responsibilities that include engagement and experience in all six core competencies of customer experience.
There is also an alternative pathway to CCXP exam eligibility for those individuals who do not have a bachelors degree and in their case, will need to demonstrate that they have a minimum of five years of relevant, full-time CX work experience as mentioned above.
The challenge
You will be tested across all six core competencies of customer experience by means of 100 extremely tricky and considerably confusing multiple-choice questions and at bare minimum, you will need to answer 80 of these questions correctly to pass. The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)™ hosts an incredibly elaborate exam resource library for prospective candidates to learn from on their website. You will find references to books, articles, case studies, whitepapers, and webinars to help guide your learning but as they say,
“There is not one book, class or particular work experience to prepare you to meet the demands of being a customer experience professional. The well-rounded individual who meets the standards of the CCXP designation has benefited from years of learning and experience in real world situations.”
~ CXPA
What worked in my CCXP journey
The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)™ has assembled an elite group of 15 ‘Recognized Training Providers’ from around the world to deliver customer experience training of the highest quality. These Recognized Training Providers offer a variety of training options to choose from – from individual coaching sessions to Customer Experience Masterclasses or online customer experience training.
In my CCXP journey, I chose the latter first.
Online Learning with CX University
CX University has several convenient, self-paced, online customer experience training options available with flexible payment plans but the one that caught my eye is the ‘CX500 Mastery Bundle’ which was recommended for CCXP exam preparation – I enrolled. I also signed up for their CX Practice Test Program but more about that in a moment.
The CX500 course from CX University is rich in carefully curated, multimedia content that was easy to understand and simple to navigate through. There was a good balance of reading materials and interactive activities that created a warm and welcoming learning experience. Their founder and CEO, Mohamed Latib Ph.D. is a seasoned academic, a pioneer in online learning, and is also taking CX to higher education with their CX800 course – which now grants learners up to 6 MBA credits.
The CX Practice Test Program is a question bank of 600 questions and answers, it covers all six core competencies of customer experience, and also gives you the ideal opportunity to test your knowledge before writing CX University’s Customer Experience Specialist (CXS)™ exam at the end of the course – which if pursued successfully, CX University certifies you as being competent in the customer experience discipline and regards you as being fully prepared to take the CXPA’s Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP)™ exam.
Valerie Peck, CCXP a well-known leader in the global CXPA community recently orchestrated a ‘Peer-to-Peer CCXP Preparation’ group of more than 100 CXPA members who used CX University’s materials in their CCXP exam preparation – they have a 100% CCXP exam pass rate!
Ian Golding’s CX Masterclass
I have also subsequently, had the incredible pleasure of attending Ian Golding’s live and in-person ‘2-day CX Masterclass and 1-day CCXP Exam Preparation Workshop’ in March last year, and the world as we all know it has not quite been the same ever since!
Ian Golding, author of ‘Customer WHAT? The honest and practical guide to Customer Experience‘ was the first person around the world to be authorized by the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)™ to teach the Customer Experience profession. Having worked with, guided, and inspired CCXP candidates in over 40 different countries, Ian Golding has mentored CX professionals to become Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP)™’s on almost every continent.
Ian’s natural ability to derive simple solutions to complex customer experience problems is exemplary, second to none, and truly inspiring. The class helped my CCXP journey to a high degree. You will spend 3-days in the company of an incredibly honest and humble human being, explore global best practices in each of the six core competencies as tested in the CCXP exam, and have your burning CX questions answered by one of the most knowledgeable and experienced CX masterminds on the planet. There is absolutely no surprise that Ian Golding was ranked first on Customer Experience Magazine’s ‘Top CX Influencers of 2021!’
CCXP Exam Preparation and CCXP Exam Simulator
Now, I have also saved some space in this post for the amazing Michael G. Bartlett who may not (yet) be a CXPA ‘Recognised Training Provider’ but has made significant contributions on the subject of CCXP Exam Preparation.
Michael authored ‘CCXP Exam Preparation,’ a book through which he shares 18 easy-to-understand guiding CX principles – with 40 sample multiple-choice questions, answers, and detailed explanations on why specific answers are correct and others, not.
Michael has also created the CCXP Exam Simulator which as the name suggests, mimics the actual exam and dependant on the CCXP Exam Simulator option you choose – can analyse your strengths and weaknesses using advanced analytics to generate a personalized study plan, allowing you to focus on specific areas that require further development – before actually taking the Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP)™ exam. Yes, there is such a thing, and thank you, Michael G. Bartlett.
My CCXP journey was enriched with plenty of useful information. Through Michael’s materials, I have gained invaluable knowledge about how to approach these tricky, multiple-choice questions, and apply these guiding principles to answer these questions correctly – which in the end, was the ‘undetected’ missing piece of my development plan.
Can you ever be over-prepared?
I have no reservations in saying that the Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP)™ is the single, most difficult exam I have ever taken, and whilst some may argue that my exam preparation was a bit extensive, let me be the first person to let you know that there is no such thing as being over-prepared for the CCXP exam!
From each of my CCXP journey learning activities, there were unique advantages and key take-aways that supplemented my overall understanding of the customer experience profession. In the end, I will not say that I completely knocked it out of the park but I did pass the CCXP exam on my first attempt and now you can do it too – or even better than I did!
Good luck.
Republished with author’s consent from original post.