Greenbook Future List Spotlight: Catherine Gauthier

Since starting your career in MRX, what would you consider to be your greatest accomplishment?

The co-creation and development of CXPA Quebec community is among my greatest accomplishment, because of its impact on the French CX community (in Quebec and worldwide) and its status as a “reference” in the field.

The reason why I’ve built CXPA Quebec was to help the French-speaking CX experts’ access CX knowledge in their native language. We help our members grow their knowledge, thanks to the many events we are holding every year, but also through the content we translate and adapt to the Quebec context. For example, for the last two years, in January, I have co-hosted an event about the new trends that will have an impact on the CX professionals. I have analyzed the trend reports of 50 groups and highlighted the 5 most important trends that CX experts from Quebec should take into consideration in their daily activities. Another example would be the creation of a document, where I asked 20 CX experts of Quebec how the pandemic was going to impact the customer experience.

My work to foster a stronger CXPA network helped the local business community develop a better understanding of our expertise and profession. As a matter of fact, we’ve been contacted every year, since our launch, to help plan the various CX conferences in our region. Event organizers reach out to me to better understand the current challenges of CX experts and showcase some great work our CXPA members have achieved. For example, this year biggest CX Conference, Les Affaires, I was a guest speaker and have led a workshop for the 150 participants about which soft skills to develop to have success in their CX projects in 2023.

Through the CXPA community, I have created opportunities for our CX experts to participate in the development of CX training programs for the startup ecosystem as well as for academia.

My involvement within CXPA and my CCXP title led me to be contacted by French CX experts around the globe to learn more about my career path and the benefits of being involved in CXPA and to be a CCXP. I’m helping them on their journey to CCXP with sound advice and resources. It’s always a pleasure to help my CX colleagues become CCXP, and thereby grow the recognition of our title.

Finally, the biggest impact I hope to have had on the MRX profession is through all the people I was able to reach, over the years, and who continues to spread the message about the importance to be customer-centric and to apply the five pillars of CX. I remain humble and thankful for all the success we have attained with the CXPA Quebec community, but I know from the feedback received by my peers that my work has been the foundation of this success. Now that I am involved in the CXPA Canada Board of Director, my mission is to continue working to promote and elevate CX nationally, so Quebec experts get better recognition in the country and so our Canadian expertise gets renowned worldwide.

If you could go back in time to when you first started your career, what advice would you give to your younger self?

I would go back in time a bit earlier when I was a student. As I remember and as I see around me, many young people are stressing about choosing the right path for their studies and career. We are so young to decide the career we are going to follow, and it can be difficult to decide when we have pressure from our family or the stress to select a career that will be lucrative and secure our future.

When I was younger, I felt that becoming a doctor will be the right path, unfortunately I quickly discover that I didn’t enjoy dissecting animals during labs, or just see blood. Realizing this, I was searching for a new field for my studies, and I found friends who were going to study business and finance, so I follow this path out of curiosity. I created a distinctive path during my programs which led me to see a different perspective of marketing. I wanted to focus on humans, and how to translate their insights into actionable initiatives for the business. At this moment, Customer Experience wasn’t a well-known discipline, but I felt that there was something there to hold on to.

That’s the advice I’ll give to my younger self: it’s the journey that matter, not the destination. Envoy everything you learn and take that knowledge into your toolbox.

Tell us about any advocacy/volunteer/association work you’re doing within the industry.

In 2017, I have co-created the CXPA Province of Quebec community. My goal was to offer a place where CX experts could regroup to share their knowledge and elevate their skills in the discipline in their native language (French).

Since CX is rarely taught in school, many experts come from different backgrounds, which brings richness to our practices. But one of the issues I was seeing in the Quebec market was that the term Customer Experience was widely used, and something overuse on a situation that was not technically customer experience. I wanted to create a place where we could advocate and educate on customer experience, how to apply the best practices of the 5 CX pillars in a business. My goal was to elevate our profession, so the CX experts could be recognized and employed on the right projects.

If you could change one thing about insights, what would it be?

From the executive of a company to the front-line employees, I would like people to be curious and eager to listen to customers. I would like to see insights naturally and by design integrated into all projects. I would also like the process of convincing people to do customer research to be less laborious. Too often people use their “internal intuition” to talk about how humans experience and create a relation with a company, and don’t want to invest the time and money to do market research.

It’s very difficult to measure the impact and ROI of doing customer research before a project, because we know that we will learn something from the research, but we never know what we will learn. I really like Robert Pressman’s quote about Software Engineering, and I feel it relates and can by applied to customer research: “$1 spent solving a problem found during discovery saves $10 to solve that problem during development and $100 after launch.” My goal is to do such an evaluation in customer experience and customer research when I enter a new project with a client.