Closing the gap:
Bridging the skills gap is the key to delivering intelligent experiences

Leaders should be open-minded about the candidates they recruit into customer experience positions, Wadsworth counsels. Soft skills such as empathy and communication, he says, are often just as important as technical expertise – although competition for these is intensifying too, according to research from the World Economic Forum. 

Above all, though, Wadsworth looks for energy and enthusiasm. “If you’ve got someone with motivation and energy, who wants to make a difference, you can teach them anything,” he says. “They’re contagious. Others tend to swarm around them because they’re interesting people. They’re changemakers, innovators and disruptors.” 

These people could come from any background, Wadworth adds: they could be nurses, police officers or government agency staff. “It’s just people who obsess over making things better for other human beings.” 

There is more to the human side of intelligent customer experiences than recruitment, however. For one thing, the various functions that create and support such experiences must collaborate effectively, with a shared focus on the moments that matter that earn customers’ loyalty. 

This is one of the drivers behind Discover Financial’s adoption of a product-based development model, Lodhia explains. The approach helps employees from across departments focus on a single outcome, namely a product or experience that delights the customer. “We work in a very cross-functional way,” she says. 

In this model, employees from all departments must understand the value of each product from the start. Data plays a key role here, Lodhia says, providing

transparency and accountability while keeping teams focused on the outcomes that matter to customers. 

“I love how we use data to get to customers’ concerns and address those concerns with a product or capability.” 

The results speak for themselves. “We built a capability called Freeze It® to place the customer at ease by helping to prevent fraudulent charges to their credit card,” Lodhia says. “It’s very simple to use and, as a result, a very popular feature.” 

In Wadsworth’s view, the cross-functional mindset is second nature to the Gen Z employees now entering the workforce. Immersed in digital experiences for their whole lives, this generation understands how they emerge from their constituent parts and their thinking is more holistic and product-focused, he says. 

An organisation’s culture also contributes to the effectiveness of its customer experiences. A crucial dimension is data literacy, Wadsworth argues: the more people understand customer data and how to use it, the more creative and innovative they can be at solving customers’ problems and creating engaging experiences. 

Training is an important tool for developing a data-literate and customer- focused culture, as well as cultivating the skills required to execute intelligent customer experiences. Indeed, signalling to current and prospective employees that your organisation will invest in their personal development is an essential part of attracting and retaining talent. “Customer experience must be championed by senior leadership if it is to be given the priority it deserves.”

But culture is shaped from the top, and Wadsworth advises that the customer experience must be championed by senior leadership if it is to be given the priority it deserves across the organisation. 

“You need the chief customer officer, or at least somebody in the C-suite, who will champion the end-to-end customer journey,” he says, “someone who’s capable of joining the dots between what happens in the call centre, what happens in the parking lot of your retail store and what happens on Twitter.” 

Without this, Wadsworth warns, good ideas for customer experience improvements will not get the investment or cross-organisational buy-in that they need to become reality.

“Good ideas implemented in siloes hold little value,” he says. “But good ideas, carefully executed as part of a holistic experience with investment in the right places, can be a rocket ship.”

• Know your strategy. Tight-knit teams focused on delivering products, driven by knowledge from customer data, with cross- departmental buy-in enables leaders to understand the key skills required but also spot any skills gaps quickly. 
  
  
• Understanding the skills mix required to deliver great experiences is essential. It’s not just about technical skills, though. It’s also about having the right attitudes and outlooks to meet customer needs. Empathy, enthusiasm and energy for customers are traits that are in increasing demand. 
  
  
• Lead from the top. Intelligent customer experiences emerge when a company’s channels are shaped by a singular vision and funded accordingly. That calls for a customer journey champion in the C-suite.

This article originally appeared in Thread, Edition 3. Thread is Kin + Carta’s quarterly magazine that cuts through the complexity of digital transformation. Making sustainable change real, achievable and attainable.