Bruce Temkin left his position as the global head of Qualtrics XM Institute in February of this year. While he puts the finishing touches to his fresh initiative, Humanity@Scale, CXM caught up with one of the founding fathers of the CXPA at his Florida home, to pick his brains about the challenges facing CX practitioners today, not giving up, getting better at customer outcomes and the impact of gen AI.

You recently described CX professionals as agents of change. In your opinion though, what are some of the biggest challenges facing CX practitioners working in corporations today?

If we agree on the definition that [CX practitioners] are agents of change, that defines a lot of challenges because in most other professions — if you’re an engineer, an accountant, a lawyer — you go in and you implement the rules that have been defined by other people. You follow a script.

CX professionals don’t have scripts. They’re trying to get organisations to do something different. Almost the entirety of your job is trying to get a bunch of people to think, act, and behave differently. That inherently has challenges, and you’re going to fail more often than you’re going to succeed.

CX professionals are trying to push organisations in directions they don’t necessarily want to go, so you’ve got to expect ‘change agents’ to have a relatively low success rate. That doesn’t mean they’re unsuccessful; it just means you’ve got to keep trying.

Another inherent challenge is structural, which is that we can’t be purists about customer experience. Customer experience in and of itself is not the ideal we’re trying to hit because at the end of the day, any organisation has a set of objectives that are its primary goals.

Our goal should be how we can help organisations succeed at their primary objectives by focusing, learning, and embracing the principal skills and tactics of customer experience. Critical job number one is finding ways in which what you are doing and what you want to do as a customer experience professional is supportive of the objectives of the senior leaders

How do we get CX professionals to focus on outcomes?

One of the things that happens to CX professionals is because there’s no pure script… [they] often try to do too much. They end up focusing on too many tasks. We want to get this data out! We want to do 400 journey mapping exercises! When, in fact, they should do fewer things but target the change that they want to see in the end.

If you’re doing a lot of things, you can’t be thoughtful about any one of them, and you end up mentally focusing on the task, not the outcome.

If CX professionals step back and say, ‘okay, what is the outcome we want to achieve?’ And if that outcome is inconsistent with the direction that the company wants to go, [they] ought to rethink [it] because the only outcomes that are going to succeed are the ones that help the organisation.

And then say, ‘what are the major things I can do to move in this direction?’ Because remember, CX professionals are not the people that do all the work across the organisation. They’re the people that introduce change and support that change. Organisations resist change, people resist change. That’s natural.

CX professionals often don’t understand that they probably don’t need to push as much change to impact on how the organisation operates.

So many companies seem to struggle to understand their own customer journeys; why do you think that is?

There’s still a lot of head scratching for sure. One of the things that I’ve always focused on is trying to understand human beings and then trying to put that understanding in the context of where they operate — whether they’re customers, employees, [or] executives.

If you just think about the executives inside a company, they might start with a refreshing hope to understand customers. But you get into a company, and you get bombarded with things you have to do. You get bombarded by your bosses, your colleagues, you have internal turmoil, you have to hire [and] worry about your employees.

These things happen, and it’s very easy for them to lose sight of customers. That’s why I think that customer journey mapping has been one of the most successful customer experience tools.

It was always astounding to see people in a room all of a sudden go, ‘oh my God, that’s what it’s like for them!’ I think that ‘ahaaaaa!’ moment exists today and will continue to exist. It’s not because people don’t care. It is just that people get so busy.

Companies who want to talk about customer experience still often miss the human experience aspect. What are you seeing play out in the market?

It’s mixed. I’ve worked with some companies that clearly, clearly understood that you can’t deliver a great customer experience without a focus on employee experience. When companies talk about customer experiences, and don’t talk about employees, I think someone has gotten them to focus too narrowly on the topic.

The companies that are really good at [CX], are focusing on their employees, they’re delivering experiences with their employees. If I want to succeed with anything in a company, if I don’t think about the employees, then the likelihood of my sustained success is low.

One of the things about people is that you can push them to comply, but it’s really hard to get them to consistently stay involved and work in the way that you want if you haven’t focused on their needs and engaged them.

It’s like kids. I can get my young kid to eat broccoli at the table if I yell. But if I don’t get them to enjoy it, then they’re never going to do it when I’m not there.

How are you seeing companies rollout gen AI to improve customer experience?

With any new technology, the path is pretty consistent. People get excited about it, they overinvest in lots of different things with it. Most of those things don’t work out, so they get a little bit disheartened with it. Then all of a sudden, a few very, very disruptive things happen that everyone has to get on-board with because they’re really important.

The ones that succeed have to pick the places where gen AI will have that significant impact, and then double down, or triple down, on their investment and focus to take advantage of the technology.

How should CX professionals be preparing for gen AI?

CX consultancies tend to be organised around insights and data. I would say that’s where gen AI probably [will have] the most profound impact. So, if I’m a CX consultant, I’m figuring out how [to] focus on this even before gen AI.

We’ve always focused on [getting] feedback from this customer or this employee. What’s missing is we don’t have a good layer of interpretation to bring back meaningful insights at the right time, or the right place, for decision makers.

So, what I would do with gen AI as a CX consultant is say, ‘okay, how can I build a practice around giving insight to consumers?’. So, the people using insights — the executives, the frontline employees, whoever they are in an organisation. How do we give them meaningful, relevant insights at the time they’re making decisions?

There’s a huge, huge, huge opportunity for people to say, we are going to empower this workflow, with insights that are meaningful and actionable for them using gen AI.

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