Writing the CXPA Book of Knowledge

Writing the World’s First Customer Experience Book of Knowledge

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Customer Experience Professional Association (CXPA)™ is the first in the world to publish a Book of Knowledge for practitioners. Go behind the scenes with Retail Mashup. Find out how a team of worldwide experts were assembled to work on this project over twelve months.

Table of Content

What is CXPA?

A collective of customer experience professionals founded CXPA back in 2011. Headquartered in the United States, CXPA’s main purpose is to evolve the customer experience practice into a global non-profit professional body. Its mission is to “support CX professionals to share, learn, inspire, and grow throughout their entire career.”

Since its inception, the professional body has amassed members from over 70 countries worldwide. There is representation from the financial services, retail, healthcare, government, and nonprofit industries, etc.

Percentage of CXPA Member who are customer experience managers, directors, or executives

0

CXPA

In addition, professionals can earn the Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) designation by passing the standardized exam. In addition, they also need to adhere to the work experience criteria.

Customer Experience Professional

Customer experience makes up of components including engagement, acquisition, onboarding, and maintenance. A customer experience professional oversees all these components through a suite of tools including strategy definition, process implementation, gap analysis, and reporting, etc.

Here is a short video on some of the tasks managed by a CX professional.

Book of Knowledge

Back in 2020, Heather Gillbanks, CCXP pondered the idea of a Book of Knowledge in the CXPA member discussion forum. The CXPA Board of Directors and its executive team headed by Greg Melia loved the idea. Heather was tipped as an Executive Editor. The goal of the publication is to assist practitioners in search of core concepts to apply in their daily work. The standard will also be used as a foundation for future research and for educational purposes.

DeAnn and I were invited to join a small team of 40+ worldwide experts in writing the Book of Knowledge. In total, more than 120 authors and reviewers were involved.

There are five sections to the publication. They are:

  • Customer Understanding and Insights
  • Customer Experience Strategy
  • Design, Implementation, and Innovation
  • Metrics, Measurements, and ROI
  • Culture and Accountability

We were tasked to write the Customer Experience Strategy section with team members from Canada, Italy, India, Japan, and United Arab Emirates, and United States.

Customer Experience Skills In Use

Customer experience is the most effective when teams work together and collaborate. This is the same with writing the Book of Knowledge. Similar to building a customer experience process, we determine layout the sections through a keyword mapping exercise. We followed this by writing in tandem and combining sections together for flow and cohesion over a period of four months. We had regularly team meetings for updates and support.

After the team completed the writing, we validated the collection before passing off the final version for quality control. The final few months were spent by the CXPA publishing team on formatting, production, and rollout.

I am happy to report that the team worked well together overall and we accomplished our goals on schedule.

Challenges

This is the first edition of the Book of Knowledge. Similar to many customer experience process implementation, the team managed some challenges along the way. We took some assumptions on:

  • How much customer experience knowledge the user would have
  • How much to write for a given topic
  • How to incorporate customer experience concepts taken into account cultural, societal, and practical elements

It was great to have a diverse worldwide team to share different ideas. We had like to give a shout out to:

  • Ashima Bhagat
  • Marc Karchies
  • Jennifer Koffie
  • Cathy Lipop
  • Rania Mehwi
  • Victor Musiwa
  • Ahmed Samir
  • Matteo Todesco

Next Steps

The Book of Knowledge is published on CX Day scheduled for October 4, 2022. You can find out more information here. All CXPA members will have first access to the publication on CX Day. Contact here if you want more information about the Book of Knowledge. You can buy it here.

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Larry Leung
Larry Leung

Larry Leung is a customer experience strategist based in Toronto, Canada. He is a Principal and Chief Experience Officer at Transformidy, a consulting agency focusing on helping brands with their customer experience strategy. He has over 20 years experience working with brands like IBM, TD Bank Group, Manulife, CIBC, Cineplex, McCain, GTAA and more.

He also has a Canadian Leadership role at the Customer Experience Professional Association (CXPA). He is a frequent contributor to local and international publications and a speaker at various conferences.

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