For those that need some inspiration, I hereby share what I’ve written down in my eligibility for the CCXP exam. You can read more about the Eligibility here.

I’ve removed the part of my work experience. You can find it on my LinkedIn. I’ve also removed sensitive information.

Your Relevant CX Experience

For each competency, please indicate your highest level of involvement using the radio buttons and then write a detailed statement summarizing your experience. Please share the work you have done or are currently doing and how it impacts your organization or customers.   Be sure to include actions taken and the outcomes of those actions. Also, in each text box, if you click and drag the two lines on the right side of the text box you can resize it to show more of the response you’re typing.

• Supported execution – a member of the team focused on execution and implementation of CX work based on corporate strategy.
• Managed execution – a supervisory role in which you led others in the accomplishment of CX work in line with a broader strategy.
• Developed strategy – a leadership role in which you set the strategy and guided individual or teams in the accomplishment of CX work.

My Relevant CX Experience

Customer Experience Strategy – Developed Strategy

At bol, we serve around 13,5 million customers each year in both the Netherlands and Belgium. We have an assortment of around 38 million products, selling through 50.000 selling partners. In the Netherlands, we are a big name and enjoy a very high Brand Awareness. Within bol, we are divided in several domains, each serving their own customer. With the amount of partners (and advertisers), you can imagine there are conflicting needs and wishes. Within our department Customer Experience Management, we focus on the consumer as customer.

In 2020, bol opened a fashion store, providing our customer now also with inspiring clothing. The aim of the “fashion” project was to understand the needs of our potential customers, and understand the pains they experienced at our platform.

This project started with extensive qualitative and quantitative research, focusing on the customer journey. We aimed to understand the needs of the customers per journey phase by doing focus groups library research and surveys. As a results, the “fashion” journey was mapped and it was clear that we needed to change our perspective on shopping at bol.

Because, when shopping for clothing, people want to feel they are at a clothing store. Not in a store that is designed for books, but that sells fashion. With our needs and pains, we showed that the current customer experience was too much focused on pragmatic shopping, and that our (new) customer wanted to experience something else.

We’ve set some guiding principles to ensure that our customers experience this fashion feeling in the specific fashion shop, setting our fashion specific CX ambition on “I feel like I am shopping at a fashion store at bol”. In two years, some of the results are: – the start of a new IT team, solely responsible on inspiration at our platform; – innovations that show articles within their context (“shop the look”) and – a high over strategy to offer more inspirational journeys throughout bol.

Metrics, Measurement, & ROI – Managed Execution

In the beginning of 2024, the CXM team at bol needed a CXM Measurement house. After I took charge in developing the Customer Journey Framework, we started to define our most challenging journeys. To determine when the journeys are successful, we needed to align on ownerships of the journey, and measurement / data per journey. For this, I lead the project that created a measurement house in Q1, 2024, together with 25 or our colleagues cross department.

The monitoring tool (or measure house) was created to monitor experience quality in key journeys and analyze leading indicators to find root causes. Together with Service Experts, Service Designers and the CXM team, we organized workshops to define journey success, the top indicators and set preliminary target range on the indicators.

We organized five workshops, where we defined the journey success (based on the CX Ambition principles), linked those definitions to data and then formed a overview of datapoints.

The outcome of this project was a group of people, all owning their journeys, linking them to the CX Ambition principles, and therefore understanding weather the journey is going successful or needs to be improved.

Customer-Centric Culture –  Developed Strategy

When starting a CXM department in 2023, a group of young and ambitious colleagues started working on projects within bol. Their prior job involved NPS-steering (or removing hurdles). With the start of the new team, the scope changed and therefore a new way of working, and way of thinking.

To drive the change within the team (and after this, the organization), I, as lead CX Way of Working, set up several workshops, common projects to work on CXM tooling and continuously check involvement and enthusiasm. Prior to the workshops and information sessions, we analyzed the difference between the current WoW and the desired WoW. We made a learning plan to then drive the transformation.

We created a goal, a common drive to improve our way of working and thinking, and made a planning when all of this should be improved and changed. All of our direct and indirect team members were highly involved in every decision, making it a common effort.

We also invited other companies that already went through such a transformation, to inspire us and also to see that it might “feel a bit rocky”, but that the result is worth it.

In January ’24, we declared ourselves “ready” and therefore a fully engaged, enthusiastic CXM team, having the common vision and spirit to making bol a more customer focussed company.

Our success became visible then in the first month, where one of our colleague her customer journey maps was forwarded to the highest level of decision-making, where it was used as an example of discussing the impact a certain innovation has on the customer’s experience.

Experience Design & Improvement – Developed Strategy & Managed Execution

Bol is a company that counts around 3000 employees, working in different business models (e-commerce, Advertising, Logistics and Foundations). Innovation is mostly driven by the business (advertising / e-commerce) due to their high knowledge of the market and their extensive market research. However, bol is also Product Led, meaning that our IT teams have full autonomy in what we buy. Running a project that combines EvB, Marketing and Product is, most of the time, very difficult due to differences in terms, responsibilities and KPI’s.

When we see different departments working together, scoping and speaking each other’s language is the main problem. At bol, we see this causes lots of frustration. For this reason, I decided to develop a Customer Journey Framework, combining all frameworks being used at bol, creating a holistic view on Customer Journeys.

I’ve introduced the Journey Framework in cross department projects, helping teams collaborate better and therefore have bigger impact on the customer experience. By giving workshops, facilitate journey mapping meetings and provide information on how to use the framework, the teams feel that they own the framework, rather than using “a CXM framework”.

Currently, we are implementing the framework in our Journey Management Tool (TheyDo) and we are creating both a partner journey framework, and an umbrella framework, combining the two.

VOC, Customer Insight & Understanding – Managed Execution & Developed Strategy

In the end of 2022, bol was creating its e-commerce strategy for the following five years. One of the big changes expected, was the impact generation Z has on shopping. To make sure we created the correct strategy, I was asked to research the potential impact this generation will have on bol.

I started the storyline with both internal and external deskresearch, forming a storyline that shows the impact generation Z has on the world, and what bol needs to change to offer them the best experience. With this storyline, the following initiatives were formed:

Voice of the customer program created where:

• Our colleagues could directly speak to Gen-Z-ers in our GenZ café;
• Could be part of our Customer Safari, where gen-zers were interviewed about their social media behavior and colleagues could ask questions;
• A  generation dashboards was created, to show our colleagues in which product categories Generation Z is already shopping, and where not;
• Every month, a KPI update is shared with all our Gen-Z interested colleagues, where statuses are shared – combined with running initiatives;
• A Master Journey has been created, plotting all known insights within our Journey Framework and spotting “white spots” that should be researched further;
• A service blue print has been made to show the dependency in between departments and their systems with the goal to launch initiatives with less friction and, therefore, more impact.
• Within bol, we’ve always used shopping needs based persona’s, and because of Generation Z we’ve introduced an update of one of the more fun shopping persona’s. Given that this generation drives the change within this type of shopping.  

Organizational Adoption & Accountability – Supported execution

After starting the Customer Experience Management team in September, 2023, we’ve mapped the stakeholder field to determine where we want to have impact in 2024. Those key stakeholders were then connected to important projects, KPI’s and movements within the company, and then we’ve mapped the decision making process.

Through doing Customer Experience pilots, we’ve created a CX Ambassador group. They are constantly part of our innovations, our projects and help spread the CXM story within the company. My role is both executing the pilots, keeping the ambassadors up to date and forming the story that they need to tell.