Natalie Onions, Vice President of Customer Experience at Customer.io, transitioned from performing arts to CX, bringing a unique perspective to the field. She shares insights on career development for both new and seasoned professionals, emphasizing empathy, curiosity, and collaboration. Natalie discusses essential traits for success and the adaptability needed in a changing landscape. She also highlights the value of diverse teams and customer feedback in driving satisfaction and business growth.
Customer experience professionals should leverage transferable skills and prioritize direct customer engagement to enhance empathy and insights.
Successful CX professionals combine empathy, adaptability, and curiosity to foster strong client relationships and drive continuous improvement in strategies.
Deep dives
Navigating a Career in Customer Experience
Customer experience professionals often come from diverse backgrounds, highlighting the importance of transferable skills over industry-specific knowledge. Engaging directly with customers is crucial for understanding their needs and driving business success. New entrants to the field should seek opportunities to interact with customers to build empathy and insight. By understanding customer journeys, professionals can effectively contribute to business strategies and enhance client relationships.
Essential Traits for CX Success
Successful customer experience professionals exhibit a unique combination of empathy, adaptability, and curiosity. Empathy allows them to connect with clients on a deeper level, enhancing the overall customer satisfaction. Adaptability is vital as they often switch between diverse customer contexts and needs, requiring a flexible approach to communication and problem-solving. Cultivating a culture of curiosity helps these professionals remain open-minded to new ideas and continually improve their strategies and processes.
Building a Dynamic CX Team
Creating an effective customer experience team involves focusing on flexibility, language diversity, and expertise to meet various customer needs. Advocacy for CX within organizations is crucial, as maintaining strong customer relationships significantly impacts overall business performance. By integrating feedback from new hires and fostering collaboration with product and engineering teams, CX leaders can ensure innovative solutions and enhance service delivery. A focus on automating repetitive tasks also allows teams to improve efficiency and enhance the customer journey.
Producer's Note: This episode originally released on March 7, 2023. Natalie Onions discussed how she became a customer experience professional and offered some great advice for newer CX pros on how to grow their careers in customer experience. Please note that this was recorded back in March of 2023, so some parts of the discussion may be outdated.
There have been many guests on this show, each with unique stories and backgrounds about their path to becoming a customer experience professional. But we haven’t often discussed how YOU can develop your own professional life. So how is your career growth going? Are you new to the profession and need some tips, or are you a seasoned pro that could use some ways to spark new creativity? How do you keep your career batteries charged? Host Steve Walker welcomes Natalie Onions, vice president of customer experience at Customer.io, a marketing automation platform, to discuss way to help develop your career as a customer experience professional.