Editorial
Research Report
Your Reputation Is On the (Phone) Line
The Gist
- The rise of the CXO often signals organizational failure. When experience needs a single executive owner, it usually means accountability has been fragmented across operations, technology and marketing.
- Customers don't want relationships — they want reliability. Emotional engagement and brand storytelling can't compensate for broken systems, inconsistent execution or preventable friction.
- Dashboards and AI can't replace operational responsibility. True customer experience improvement comes from radical reliability — fixing systems, reducing effort and embedding ownership where execution actually happens.
The emergence of the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) is often framed as progress, but the data suggests it is often a signal of organizational failure. In practice, the role functions as a patch for broken accountability.
CX Titles Replace Accountability
When a company requires a dedicated executive to "own" experience, it is usually because operations, technology and marketing have abdicated that responsibility. The proof is in the results: despite the proliferation of CX titles, Forrester's 2025 CX Index hit an all-time low for the fourth consecutive year.
Why does adding a "Chief" fail to fix the problem? Because the role is often designed to manage conflict rather than execution. CXOs report spending nearly 40% of their time (2022) just "making the case" for experience, essentially begging other departments to care, rather than implementing improvements. By creating a separate CX silo, organizations inadvertently let other leaders off the hook: the CMO focuses on ads, the COO cuts costs and the CXO is left to explain why the "efficient" process broke the "brand promise."
Table of Contents
- Experience Is an Output, Not a Function
- The 'Relationship' Delusion in Customer Experience
- The Algorithm Is Not Empathy
- The New (Old) Way Forward: Radical Reliability
Experience Is an Output, Not a Function
In a healthy organization, customer experience is an output, not a function. It emerges from how systems behave, how policies are enforced and how handoffs are managed. Assigning that outcome to a single role turns experience into a proxy responsibility rather than a shared one.
Worse, the CXO role enables abdication. Billing teams assume confusion is someone else's problem. Technology teams deprioritize usability in favor of roadmaps. Marketing teams focus on messaging rather than accuracy. Experience becomes a discussion topic instead of a design constraint.
This misalignment is expensive. Organizations continue to invest heavily in martech while leaving much of it idle. Tools are purchased to observe customer frustration rather than eliminate its source. The known issues remain known and unfixed.
Experience does not need a steward. It needs ownership embedded where execution lives. That responsibility belongs with operations, not with a symbolic title.
Related Article: What Do Customer Experience Teams Actually Look Like?
The 'Relationship' Delusion in Customer Experience
Marketing language often positions emotional connection as the primary goal. Engagement and community are presented as universal ambitions. In practice, most customers want something far simpler. They want the product to work, the service to be predictable and the transaction to be accurate.
Most Customers Want Transactions, Not Bonds
Bob Hoffman's refrigerator test exposes this gap cleanly. Consumers do not form emotional bonds with everyday brands. They select them based on reliability and habit. (Remember our recent McDonald's piece?) Mark Ritson reinforces the same point from a strategic perspective. Purpose and storytelling do not compensate for inconsistency. They amplify it.
As Ritson argues, no amount of storytelling can compensate for what he calls "inconsistabilification," the fatal gap between a brand's lofty purpose and its operational reality.
Invisibility Is the Highest Form of Respect
The most respectful experience a brand can offer is invisibility. When systems work and friction is removed, customers do not need to think about the brand at all. When brands demand attention, it is often because something failed upstream.
Engagement is frequently misread as success. In many cases, it is evidence of friction. The goal is not to create interaction. It is to remove the need for it.
The Algorithm Is Not Empathy
As organizations scale, they fall into the trap of Surrogation: replacing the messy, unscalable work of human judgment with the clean, scalable fiction of data inference. They stop looking at the customer and start looking at the dashboard, mistaking the map for the territory.
Dashboards Become a Substitute for Judgment
When issues are simple, automation can help. When issues are complex, it often gets in the way. Most customers still prefer human resolution for meaningful problems, and tolerance for automated friction is low. A single frustrating interaction is often enough to trigger churn. That said, I really was impressed with Kustomer's approach.
Inference Replaces Responsibility
The deeper issue is structural. Algorithms are frequently used to buffer leadership from operational reality. Dashboards replace conversations. Scores replace responsibility. Inference replaces action.
Companies do not need advanced models to know that long hold times cause frustration. They need staffing. They do not need sentiment analysis to identify billing confusion. They need clearer bills.
Technology should remove friction, not narrate it. When tools become substitutes for operational courage, they stop serving the customer.
The New (Old) Way Forward: Radical Reliability
If the titles like chief experience officer, frameworks and dashboards are stripped away, what remains is a simple mandate. Make the system work, every time.
Radical reliability is not a new idea. It is simply unfashionable. It does not produce keynote slides or emotional resonance. It produces retention.
This approach starts by treating customer journey mapping as system architecture rather than storytelling. Every stage must dictate a concrete CRM behavior. If a map does not change automation, suppression or sequencing, it has no operational value.
Measurement must also change. Metrics that capture intent and affection are poor predictors of behavior. Effort is a stronger signal. The harder it is to get something done, the faster customers leave. Reducing customer effort reduces churn without requiring persuasion.
Webinar
Feb
25
Content Strategy Leaders Live: Scaling for Speed, Complexity and AI in High Tech
A candid roundtable on how high-tech leaders are rethinking content at scale.
Register
Webinar
Feb
26
Why Customer Insights Never Turn Into Action
The gap between insight and action is solvable...once you understand how scattered knowledge can wreak havoc on execution.
Register
Webinar
Feb
26
Do More with Less: Modernizing the Cloud Contact Center for 2026
Learn how to leverage cloud platforms without adding a single hire to personalize every customer interaction.
Register
Webinar
Mar
25
Content Leaders Collective: Navigating Content Decisions at Scale
Discover how content leaders are modernizing content operations, avoiding costly missteps and preparing for scale and AI.
Register
Webinar
On demand
Cut the Noise: Deploying AI That Actually Moves the Needle
Learn how to turn AI experimentation into concrete revenue operations.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Ditch the Desk Phones: How Modern Teams Drive AI-First Communications
Find out how one team finally pulled the plug on a legacy phone system. And built something smarter.
Watch Now
The objective is not to impress. It is to remove variance. When interactions behave consistently, customers stop evaluating the experience altogether.
That is the end state worth pursuing.
You do not need a bond with your toaster. You need it to work. Customers want the same from every system they depend on. When reliability is proven through repetition, preference forms quietly, without points, perks or performance theater.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.