Report: Customer experience pros hampered by lack of training

Dive Brief:

"Skills and training" and "employee experience" are the two greatest obstacles to the success of customer experience (CX) programs, according to experience management company Momentive's 2022 State of CX Report. Motivation proves to be a bigger problem with smaller teams, the report found.
The attention of leadership is key to high-quality programs with a strong return on investment. Sixty-nine percent of respondents who said their executive team is invested in their customer experience program reported high ROI.
Momentive surveyed more than 2,200 industry professionals for its report.

Dive Insight:

It's long been known that employee experience and customer satisfaction are intricately linked. An Eagle Hill report from July reinforced that knowledge, finding that 64% of U.S. workers said the employee experience impacted their ability to serve customers. Those with an overall negative employee experience said they were twice as likely to not deliver quality outcomes.

To improve the experience of CX professionals, Momentive recommended companies "bridge the gap" between CX and HR. Human resources professionals can help by finding the right people by aligning "desired employee traits with the characteristics needed to live up to the brand promise," gathering insights from new hires on the customer experience and investing in better training.

Continuous training may be essential for maintaining the quality of all roles, not just customer experience. Employees routinely cite a lack of professional development opportunities as a primary factor for going on the job hunt.

In addition, disagreement about learning opportunities has emerged between leadership and workers. Certain industries showed particularly strong divides, such as the financial services industry, in which 90.5% of employers said they offered such opportunities, but only 30% of employees felt the same.

HR leaders with CX teams can gather feedback from employees on whether available training is sufficient and enables them to meet their goals, and can prioritize investing in more robust programs if the current options are falling short.