March 31, 2026
The Competencies CX Stars Say the Profession Now Requires
The job description for a CX professional has changed considerably in the last few years, even if the job titles haven’t. Empathy, data literacy, stakeholder management — these are still on the list, but they no longer cover it. The CXM Stars 2026 professionals reveal a more specific, more evolved picture. The new CX skill set requires a set of competencies defined by where the discipline is right now.
Emotional Intelligence Is No Longer a Soft Skill
Michael Mattson at ei empowered has spent 2025 making a single argument as loudly as possible: emotional intelligence is the foundation of CX. He said: “Emotional intelligence and human connection aren’t soft skills. They’re strategic advantages separating sustainable success from short-term wins.”
His work last year included building the world’s first biometric EQ training programme, which uses smartwatch data alongside curriculum and cohort learning to help professionals understand their own emotional responses in real time. The premise is that if you can’t read and regulate your own emotional state, you can’t reliably read a customer’s.
Katie Stabler at CULTIVATE has been making a parallel argument through her CX-ISM framework, putting psychology and emotion as the design inputs that AI and dashboards can’t replace. Her 2025 project list spans aviation, telecoms, veterinary healthcare, and commercial property, and the throughline is the same in every sector. Organisations that reduce CX to metrics alone lose the human intent that made their experience worth measuring in the first place.
The practical skill here is being able to name emotional dynamics, design for them, and teach others to do the same.
Commercial Fluency: Speaking the Language of the Room
Sue Duris at M4 Comms is direct about the profession’s credibility problem. She says: “CX professionals talk about customer-centricity and journey optimisation while boards ask ‘what’s the ROI?’ and we struggle to answer convincingly.”
Her response has been to embed commercial literacy into everything she does: coaching startup founders on CX-driven retention, teaching the next generation at Hult International Business School that CX is a strategic discipline, and rebuilding VoC frameworks specifically around the metrics that keep executives awake. Tools she deploys regularly include Salesforce, Power BI, and standardised survey methodologies that she has consistently used to lift response rates by 20–120% across telecoms, fintech, and financial services clients.
Cecilia Anderson at Infopro Learning takes the same argument into leadership development. Her multi-country leadership academies, delivered to around 300 senior leaders across the UK, France, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands in 2025, are explicitly designed around commercial priorities, not CX theory.
“Sustainable customer outcomes depend on how leaders shape culture, accountability, and cross-functional collaboration,” she says. If a CX professional can’t connect what they’re doing to retention, revenue, or cost, they’re speaking a language the business doesn’t need to listen to.
Data Integration, Not Just Data Literacy
The CX leaders consistently distinguish between being able to read data and being able to build systems that connect disparate data into something useful.
Uzair Hamid at Assembly Global spent 2025 setting up a CRM Center of Excellence across Dubai, Riyadh, and Cairo, moving CRM from execution support to a full-spectrum capability covering strategy, data, platforms, and managed services. He also built a competitive intelligence function that let CX teams benchmark their omnichannel communications against market signals rather than internal dashboards alone. The skill he’s describing is systems architecture thinking applied to customer data.
Dave Stubberfield at Carter Consultancy built his development programme around a single observation, which is that most CX education lacks context. Generic training doesn’t transfer because professionals can’t bridge from principle to their specific organisation.
His CX in ConteXt Programme, now running inside BT Group and Currys, teaches exactly that — contextualisation, the ability to translate a universal CX concept into something executable given a particular company’s structure, culture, and limitations. Across clients, the results have been measurable: NPS up 24 points, complaints down 64%, employee engagement up 37%.
Storytelling as a Core Competency
Two leaders in this list have made storytelling not just a communication approach but the central methodology of their work.
Julien Rio built his entire 2025 output around three pillars: advocacy through storytelling, customer-centric frameworks, and the psychology of engagement. His Marketing Blueprint series deconstructs behavioural concepts, like the Cobra Effect, Anchoring Bias, the Broken Window Theory, and turns them into practical tools for anticipating customer friction. The argument is that understanding why customers behave the way they do requires a psychological vocabulary, not just a survey instrument.
Mike Kendall at The Customer Lab has developed the GrowthLens framework, a structured approach for combining AI and human intelligence in customer insight, and uses it specifically to help CX professionals translate what they know about customers into decisions that product and strategy teams will act on.
His year included becoming Product Discovery Certified by Pendo and coursework in what he calls “vibe coding,” an early signal that technical fluency is becoming part of the CX skill set, not just a nice-to-have.
