Editorial
Research Report
Business Leaders CX Report: What’s Working and What’s Not in AI-Driven CX
The Gist
- The CXO role is only hollow when it lacks authority. A chief experience officer becomes symbolic when organizations assign accountability without decision rights, budget influence or cross-functional power.
- Great CX needs an orchestrator. The author argues customer journeys span silos like marketing, product, service and operations, making alignment itself a leadership function.
- Experience starts inside the company. Strong CX leaders improve employee tools, processes and incentives because frontline friction often becomes customer friction.
Earlier this year, my fellow CMSWire Contributor Brian Riback crafted a very provocative piece around the idea that the chief experience officer (CXO) is a “vanity role.” I spent a lot of time reading and re-reading that article (thanks Brian!) and have thought a great deal about why my reaction was so visceral.
All the points made in the article were fair and based on the author’s own experience and expertise. I agreed with several ideas that were shared.
So why did I feel such a strong need to present an alternative point of view?
Well, first off, I AM a chief experience officer. Right now. And my prior role was as a chief customer officer, a role which receives similar criticisms and a title that is often used interchangeably with chief experience officer. I’ve also had the surreal opportunity of defending the role to some of the very people who believed it necessary (not lately, but historically).
So I know a little about why the role is important, often misunderstood and, let’s say, open to interpretation.
Table of Contents
- Can Chief Customer Officer Be a Hollow Role?
- The CXO as System Integrator, Not Experience Owner
- Hey, Chief Experience Officer, What Do You Do Again?
- Vanity Schmanity
Can Chief Customer Officer Be a Hollow Role?
For starters, yes, the chief experience officer can be a well-intentioned but ultimately hollow role. A signal that an organization is compensating for deeper operational dysfunction rather than fixing it. At times, the role is positioned as symbolic, charged with “owning experience” in organizations where no single function can. There’s some truth in all of that.
As I mulled over Brian’s well-articulated premise, I summoned the spirit of one of my favorite television characters of all time, The West Wing’s Leo McGarry, Chief of Staff to fictional President Jed Bartlett. While it seemed that Leo spent much of his time hanging out and playing pool with the President, I always enjoyed watching him work his magic in a job that is traditionally defined by the person who currently owns it.
The thought that started to form for me was that, sometimes, the most necessary roles in an organization are the ones that are hardest to define. And, like many other roles, they are crafted by the people who tackle them, hopefully with a big helping of curiosity, experience and humor.
Related Article: Chief Customer Officer Challenges: From 'Mean Girls' Politics to Real CX Power
The CXO as System Integrator, Not Experience Owner
Let’s start by reframing the role. The CXO is not really the owner of experience. In my humble opinion, they are the architect of alignment that makes great experience possible. In most organizations that I’ve been a part of, the customer journey cuts across marketing, product, operations, service and technology. Each function optimizes for its own goals, metrics and constraints. And individually, those optimizations make sense.
But, collectively, they often create friction because no one part of the organization is tasked with naming the gaps between them. And they certainly aren’t incentivized to fix them even when they do see them. Enter the CXO who is beholden to ensure that the journey is well coordinated across the silos.
That’s not vanity; it’s orchestration.
Hey, Chief Experience Officer, What Do You Do Again?
I got this question quite a bit in my professional past. Today, when people ask me, “What exactly is a Chief Experience Officer?” I often answer that it’s my job to make sure that a company’s experience strategy is aligned with their technology and execution.
Blank stare.
I get it. It’s not like being a doctor or a lawyer. It’s not even like being a CFO who can usually boil it down to “I’m in charge of the money.” There are a lot of nuances to the role, and it can and does differ from organization to organization. However, there are some core qualities that truly elevate this role from afterthought to indispensable:
Connector: Alignment as Discipline
When operating at the highest level, the chief experience officer acts as the connective tissue across functions. They translate priorities and force clarity when ambiguity muddies the waters. They are the ones who often connect the dots between what marketing promises, what product builds, what operations delivers and what customers actually experience. They are measuring, listening and activating to ensure that the expected outcomes are happening in a way that makes customers come back and keeps employees from running away.
Innovator: Experience as Growth
If the CXO is simply sending surveys and dashboards, the role should be reconsidered. Experience isn’t reviews and responses to complaints. It is the source of differentiation and growth. When friction is identified, it’s not just something to be explained away. It’s a signal to a problem or a need that is not being met. That is the engine that can fuel innovation, creativity and new or improved features, products and services. Human centered design cycles always begin with a deep understanding of the customer, and your CXO should be leading the charge when it comes to connecting experience to revenue, retention and expansion.
Related Article: The 'Chief Experience Officer' (CXO) Is a Vanity Title
Empathizer: Humanity as Force Multiplier
There is debate in some circles, and Brian talks about this in his piece, about whether customers really want to have relationships with brands. We do know from years of research and study of consumer behaviors — some of which I’ve done myself — that brand loyalty is driven by trust, communication and transparency. Customers don’t want inauthentic, intrusive or forced intimacy with a brand, but they do expect to be understood, listened to and valued.
We can debate semantics over whether that qualifies as the basis of a relationship, but the hill that I will die on is this: empathy, in the context of experience, isn’t about sentiment. It’s about decision quality.
By operationalizing empathy — through human-centered design, customer research, strong listening programs and analytics — CXOs are the leaders in the organization who embed empathy into processes, priorities and trade space conversations. They know that when organizations deeply understand their customers, they make better decisions.
Advocate: Employees as Ground Zero
Another hill I will die on: You cannot tackle customer experience without fully understanding the employee experience that delivers it. CXOs are best positioned to drive change for both sides of the experience coin. Frontline teams live the friction customers feel every day, and they are often expected to solve for that friction without the proper context or tools. A strong, empowered CXO elevates both voices. They are finding where processes break down, where systems create unnecessary complexity and where employees are being set up to fail the very customers they are trying to serve.
Experience is certainly what customers feel and perceive, but it’s also what employees can deliver. In many organizations this employee experience piece is mistaken for sharing too much DNA with HR, who typically owns the company’s relationship with its employees. But the kind of experience that needs to be driven here is very practical and grounded in data and design. The chief experience officer probably isn’t managing benefits or designing compensation packages, but they should absolutely be leading the charge around process improvements, change adoption and management and tying incentives to customer outcomes.
Related Article: The Employee-Customer Experience Tango: Are You in Sync?
Core Traits of an Effective CXO
The chief experience officer role can vary by organization, but the most effective leaders consistently excel in four areas that turn the title from symbolic to strategic.
| Trait | What It Means | Business Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Connector | Aligns marketing, product, operations and service around a unified customer journey. Clarifies priorities and closes gaps between teams. | Reduces friction, improves consistency and strengthens loyalty. |
| Innovator | Treats customer friction as insight, not complaints. Uses feedback to shape better products, services and experiences. | Drives growth, retention and competitive differentiation. |
| Empathizer | Turns trust, listening and customer understanding into smarter decisions through research, analytics and design. | Improves decision quality and deepens brand trust. |
| Advocate | Recognizes that employee experience powers customer experience. Fixes broken processes, tools and incentives for frontline teams. | Enables better service delivery and stronger workforce performance. |
Webinar
May
12
How Marketing Teams Can Take Control of the Web Experience
See how Veo and Kvalifik put marketing in the driver's seat, shipping faster and growing qualified bookings by 150%.
Register
Webinar
May
14
Two Audiences, One WordPress. Is Yours Ready?
The practical steps to making your WordPress portfolio ready for both human visitors and AI agents.
Register
Webinar
May
19
From Content Sprawl to Competitive Advantage: A Knowledge Operations Roadmap
How automation, AI and a centralized content platform turn knowledge fragmentation into a scalable competitive advantage.
Register
Webinar
May
20
From AI Investment to CX Results: What Enterprise Leaders Need to Know
Move beyond experiments. See how top enterprises scale AI for CX results.
Register
Webinar
On demand
AI for Your DXP: Connect What You Have, Transform How You Work
Most AI strategies stop at the platform—but work happens elsewhere. Bring intelligence into Teams, email, tickets and CRM.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Why Your AI Media Stack Is Leaking Revenue — And What Fixes It
Stop layering AI on a broken foundation and start building the operating model that makes every media investment compound.
Watch Now
Vanity Schmanity
Does the CXO role always hit the mark? Nope. Is it sometimes a vanity title? It certainly can be when it’s not thoughtfully designed with those core qualities in mind or staffed with a leader who can cut through the noise and … pardon my French … GSD.
But I’ll return to my West Wing example from earlier and one of my favorite Leo McGarry leadership quotes: “If we’re gonna walk into walls, I want us running into 'em full speed.” The CXO is likely to be running into a lot of walls. If the role isn’t infused with authority, decision-making rights or is expected to influence without the ability to manage change, it’s going to be impossible to run with enough force to knock those walls down.
But that isn’t necessarily a failure of the role; it’s a failure of how the organization has chosen to empower it. The CXO doesn’t exist to “own experience.” It exists to ensure that experience is treated as a strategic outcome, one that requires coordination across the entire organization.
If your CXO feels ineffective or unnecessary, it’s worth asking why. Is it because the organization — or the leaders themselves — haven’t fully committed to the kind of alignment, accountability and cross-functional execution that truly great experience requires?
In that case, the role of CXO might actually be a mirror, reflecting more about the organization than the role itself.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.