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.
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.
Follow this link for more information about the Retail Mashup content platform
Follow this link to participate in weekly polls