Editorial
Research Report
Building the Case for Modern Public Sector Messaging
The Gist
- Should a Chief Experience Officer try to make their own role unnecessary? Yes — the goal isn't a CX department that reminds others to think about customers, but an organization where that thinking is already built in.
- What's the real problem with most CX teams' Voice of Customer work? They get skilled at documenting friction instead of designing it out of the experience entirely.
- What separates a mature CX organization from a centralized one? Other departments — Operations, Marketing, HR — start asking "how does this affect the customer?" on their own, without CX prompting them.
Why would a chief experience officer, or anyone responsible for customer experience for that matter, work toward making their own role less necessary?
The goal of customer experience was never to create a department that reminds everyone else to think about the customer. The goal IS to build an organization where customer thinking is embedded into every decision, every process and every interaction.
In the most mature organizations, customer experience isn't something the CX team owns. It's simply how the business operates. But unfortunately, that's not how many organizations are designed.
What Happens When Customer Thinking Isn't Embedded Everywhere?
Customer experience often becomes centralized within one function. The CX team gathers feedback, maps customer journeys, analyzes survey results and presents recommendations to leadership. They become experts at identifying friction.
However, identifying friction isn't the same as removing it. Let's look at one example:
What Matters Here: What Does A Centralized CX Team Typically Get Good At?
They become skilled at gathering feedback, mapping journeys and identifying friction — but that expertise ends at diagnosis, not resolution.
Why Doesn't Identifying Friction Automatically Remove It?
During a recent customer experience audit with an automotive collision center, I noticed something interesting. The team was incredibly knowledgeable, and they had thoughtful answers to nearly every customer question. Customers wanted to know how insurance worked, whether they needed a rental vehicle, where they should park when they arrived and what costs they would be responsible for. The staff answered these questions dozens of times every week.
Most organizations would see this as valuable voice of the customer data. I saw it differently.
I wasn't interested in helping the team answer those questions more effectively. I wanted to understand why customers still had to ask them in the first place.
As we walked through the customer journey together, the answer became obvious. The information customers needed wasn't designed into the experience. It lived inside the heads of employees.
Simple improvements: better arrival instructions, clearer communication before the appointment, a more intentional explanation of the insurance process and a more thoughtful check-in experience could eliminate many of those questions before the customer ever asked them.
That's when I realized too many customer experience initiatives focus on documenting customer friction instead of designing it out of the experience.
What Matters Here: What Was Missing From The Collision Center's Customer Journey?
The answers customers needed existed only inside employees' heads, not in the process itself — arrival instructions, insurance explanations and check-in details were never designed into the experience.
Related Article: The Chief Customer Officer Isn't Just a Voice of the Customer Anymore
What Did The Collision Center's Repeated Questions Actually Reveal?
The role of customer experience shouldn't be to become exceptionally good at measuring problems. It should be to make those problems increasingly rare.
That's also why I believe a great CXO should be working to design themselves out of the job. Not by eliminating the position, but by eliminating the organization's dependence on it.
If every process requires the CXO to point out what's confusing, something is wrong. If every customer complaint has to be escalated through one department before it gets fixed, the organization hasn't built customer ownership, it's just centralized it.
What Matters Here: What's The Difference Between Eliminating A Role And Eliminating Dependence On It?
Designing the job away doesn't mean removing the position — it means building enough customer ownership elsewhere that the organization no longer needs one person to catch what's confusing.
What Does It Mean For A CXO To Design Themselves Out Of The Job?
Customer experience matures when operations begins asking, "How will this affect the customer?" before launching a new process. It matures when marketing prioritizes clarity because confusion is unacceptable, not because the CX team asked them to. It matures when human resources hires leaders who naturally think about the customer impact of their decisions.
At that point, the chief experience officer has accomplished something much bigger than improving CSAT scores. They've helped create an organization where customer thinking is no longer dependent on one person.
What Matters Here: What Changes When Operations, Marketing and HR Each Own Customer Impact?
Customer thinking shifts from a mandate handed down by the CX team to a standard those functions apply on their own — which is what actually reduces dependence on a single department.
What Signals Show Customer Experience Has Matured Beyond One Department?
Organizations often ask how to build a stronger customer experience function. I think there's a better question to ask.
Replacing Tasks, Not Roles: The Changing Nature of Contact Center Work
Register
How Fast-Moving Content Teams Keep Up as Sites Grow
Register
From Automation to Intelligence: How Leading Teams Are Rethinking Operations
Register
How to Win the War for Agentic Citations: The AEO Playbook You Need Now
Register
How do we build a company where every leader owns the customer experience?
Quite possibly the greatest legacy a chief experience Officer can leave behind isn't a better dashboard or a more detailed journey map; it's an organization that no longer needs someone reminding people to think about the customer.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.