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This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.

Customer experience isn’t a role people typically train for. It’s a role they’re thrust into.

Most CX leaders didn’t start their careers with “customer experience” in their job title. They’re asked to step into i

t, often for the first time, in organizations that are just beginning to recognize the need. There’s usually no roadmap, no precedent, and no formal team—just a mandate to “go fix the experience.”

That’s exactly how I started. Our CEO asked if I could find out what our B2B customers really thought of us and work with teams to make improvements where needed. At the time, I didn’t know this was a discipline with its own frameworks, methods, and community. Then I went to a conference, and my eyes were opened. I started reading everything I could get my hands on. I showed up to local CXPA events. I met people who were doing the work and willing to share what they had learned.

That kind of curiosity and connection still drives me. But looking back, there are a few things I wish I had known when I was just getting started.

1. Research and insights should guide you

The urge to act quickly is strong, especially when you're new. A few customer complaints, a clunky process, a dip in your survey scores… it’s easy to grab onto the first thing you see and try to fix it. But reacting without understanding the full picture can waste resources, solve the wrong problem, or even create unintended consequences. Without knowing how the organization operates—or listening to the employees doing the work—you risk adding complexity, creating rework, or damaging the employee experience in the process.

What I wish I had understood earlier is how critical it is to anchor your work in structured, intentional research. Good decisions come from insight, not assumption. That means pairing data with direct listening. Surveys, interviews, shadowing, and advisory boards are not just check-the-box activities. They help you understand what matters most to customers and employees and what they expect from your organization.

The most valuable insights often emerge when you can see the same theme appear across multiple sources. When you hear it in feedback, see it in the numbers, and watch it happen in real life, you know you’re onto something meaningful. Research doesn’t slow down CX. It sharpens your focus and ensures you’re putting your energy where it counts.

2. Data intelligence isn’t optional

Of course, once you start collecting insights, you have to know how to work with them. One of the first things I learned is that access to data isn’t the same as knowing how to use it. In customer experience, people will bring you dashboards, spreadsheets, survey exports, and reports. You’ll be expected to interpret them, explain the “why,” and connect the dots across the organization.

You don’t need to be a data scientist, but you do need to be comfortable navigating large data sets and asking the right questions. What are the trends? What’s noise, and what’s meaningful? Most importantly, what’s driving behavior?

Driver analysis is a game-changer, when you can layer different data sources together and spot the patterns. If you’re not equipped with the tools and mindset to explore and interpret data, it becomes difficult to lead. Data intelligence is what allows you to move from anecdote to action. Without it, your recommendations risk sounding vague or reactive. With it, you can prioritize clearly, back up your decisions, and uncover opportunities others might miss.

3. Financial acumen opens doors

Even when your work is grounded in solid research and strong data, it won’t gain traction unless it connects to the business. Early on, I believed that if something improved the customer journey, it was inherently valuable. And while that may be true, value alone doesn’t always guarantee support.

To build credibility and secure buy-in, you need to understand how your organization measures success. That means knowing how revenue flows, how retention is tracked, how costs are managed, and what levers matter most to the executive team. It also means being able to speak their language.

You don’t have to be a finance expert, but you do need to frame your work in ways that align with business goals. If an initiative improves the onboarding experience, what’s the financial impact? If a pain point is driving churn, what’s it costing the business? Being able to connect CX to growth, efficiency, or risk reduction changes the conversation. It’s what keeps the C-suite engaged, keeps your role seen as valuable, and keeps your work funded when priorities compete. If you want CX to be more than a moment, it has to make business sense.

If these are not things you know how to do yet, it’s time to start learning. These skills are essential if you want to lead customer experience work that drives real change.

Here are 20 actionable things you can do to begin building that foundation:

Getting Started:

🧭1️⃣Schedule a one-on-one with someone in Finance, IT, and Ops to learn how they view customers.

🧭2️⃣Join a local CXPA meetup to connect with others in the field… or level up and attend CX Leaders Advance at the end of the month for deeper insights and real talk with fellow practitioners. I’d love to see you there!

🧭3️⃣Pick one customer experience book to read this month… or go full pro mode and join Megan Burns’ CX Book Club for expert discussion and community.

🧭4️⃣Set up recurring time on your calendar for outside-in learning—podcasts, case studies, or articles. Add in professional resources like the CXPA Effective Collaboration Series, a set of monographs designed to help CX teams and departments speak a shared language and work toward common goals.

🧭5️⃣Ask five people in your organization how they define a great customer experience. The range of answers will teach you a lot about your starting point.

Research & Insights:

🔍1️⃣Sit in on a support call review session or customer listening forum. Pay attention not just to what customers say, but how teams interpret it and what gets acted on.

🔍2️⃣ Lead or observe a qualitative interview with a recent customer. Notice what they volunteer versus what you have to ask. Read The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you to improve your ability to ask better, bias-free questions.

🔍3️⃣Understand how quantitative and qualitative methods work together. Don’t just count scores - look for patterns, test assumptions, and use interviews or observations to explain what the numbers can’t. And if you’re running surveys, bookmark a sample size calculator like this one from Interaction Metrics to ensure your data is statistically sound.

🔍4️⃣Study the fundamentals of decision science. Knowing how people actually make choices (not how we think they should) will make your insights more actionable and your recommendations more grounded.

🔍5️⃣Learn the basics of cognitive bias and how they show up in survey design, analysis, and decision-making.

Data Intelligence:

📊1️⃣Partner with a data analyst to walk through customer feedback, usage data, or operational reports together.

📊2️⃣Take a free data literacy course to build your confidence. Look for content on data interpretation, storytelling, and making data accessible across teams.

📊3️⃣ Get access to core dashboards and reporting tools. Learn how to navigate them and understand what each metric tells you, and what it doesn’t.

📊4️⃣Practice identifying the “why” behind the data. When you see a spike or a drop, dig deeper. What changed? Who was impacted? What’s the root cause?

📊5️⃣Explore driver analysis tools and techniques. Start simple: run a correlation in Excel, then learn how platforms like Qualtrics or Medallia surface key drivers.

Financial Acumen:

💰1️⃣Read Making Numbers Count by Chip Heath and Karla Starr and Winning on Purpose by Fred Reichheld. Both will help you communicate value in ways that resonate with leadership.

💰2️⃣Review your company’s annual report or strategic plan. Highlight every mention of customers, retention, brand, or loyalty - and align your CX priorities to those goals. Or, if you’re a consultant, listen to earnings calls and read the annual report for companies you work with, or want to work with. This helps you understand what the C-suite is prioritizing and how customer-related initiatives show up in investor conversations. It’s one of the clearest windows into what truly matters to the business.

💰3️⃣Ask someone in Finance to walk you through how revenue, retention, and cost to serve are tracked. Understand what levers they monitor and how they assess investments.

💰4️⃣Take a real operational process and connect it to customer impact. For example, if you're streamlining underwriting by reducing back-and-forth or automating steps, estimate how much that shortens time to serve and improves the customer experience. Then translate those gains into operational efficiency and business value.

💰5️⃣Learn how your organization calculates customer lifetime value (CLV). If it doesn’t, start a conversation about why it matters and how to build a simple model.

Customer experience is complex, but you don’t have to figure it out alone. Whether you're just getting started or trying to build momentum in a tough environment, I help leaders focus their CX efforts where it counts (backed by strategy, insight, and measurable impact).

If you're navigating any of these challenges and want to explore what’s possible, feel free to reach out. Here's a link to connect.

LoyaltyCraft was built from a passion for helping companies create meaningful customer experiences. Founded in 2016 by Lauren Feehrer CCXP, we focus on strategy, qualitative research, customer design, and employee engagement to help mid-market companies open the door to new customers and keep existing ones from leaving out the backdoor.