As markets become increasingly competitive and differentiation through product features alone grows more difficult, forward-thinking companies have recognized that experience can be their most sustainable competitive advantage. This realization has given rise to a relatively new but increasingly influential C-suite position: the Chief Experience Officer (CXO).
The CXO represents the elevation of experience—both customer and employee—to a strategic priority worthy of executive leadership. Unlike traditional siloed approaches where customer service, user experience, and employee engagement pulse operate separately, the CXO brings these interconnected experience dimensions under unified leadership.
This article explores who the Chief Experience Officer is, what they do, why the role matters, and how it’s transforming organizations across industries.
Defining the Chief Experience Officer Role
The Chief Experience Officer is the executive responsible for comprehensively overseeing, designing, and improving experiences across the organization’s ecosystem. While implementations vary, the CXO typically has four core areas of responsibility:
1. Customer Experience (CX)
The CXO ensures that every customer touchpoint—from marketing and sales to product use, support, and renewal—delivers a consistent, intentional experience that aligns with the brand promise. This includes:
- Developing customer journey maps and experience strategies
- Establishing CX measurement frameworks and governance
- Identifying and resolving experience gaps and friction points
- Creating service design standards and principles
- Driving voice-of-customer programs and feedback systems
2. Employee Experience (EX)
Recognizing that employee experience directly impacts customer experience, CXOs increasingly oversee the holistic employee journey, working in partnership with HR. Their EX responsibilities may include:
- Designing consistent employee journeys from recruitment through alumni status
- Creating workplace environments (physical and digital) that enhance productivity and wellbeing
- Developing internal communication and feedback systems
- Enabling frontline employees to deliver exceptional customer experiences
- Building experience-centric culture and mindsets
3. Product Experience (PX)
While Product Management typically owns product roadmaps, the CXO ensures that products deliver intuitive, valuable experiences that align with broader experience goals:
- Collaborating on user research and experience design
- Ensuring consistent experience patterns across product portfolios
- Advocating for experience quality in product development processes
- Measuring and improving product usability and satisfaction
- Harmonizing digital and physical product experiences
4. Brand Experience Alignment
The CXO ensures that the brand promise and the actual delivered experience reinforce each other:
- Aligning experience delivery with brand positioning and values
- Identifying signature moments that differentiate the brand experience
- Ensuring consistent experience expression across all channels
- Measuring and closing gaps between brand expectations and experience reality
The Organizational Position of the CXO
The Chief Experience Officer typically reports directly to the CEO, indicating the strategic importance of experience. However, organizational structures vary based on company size, industry, and maturity:
Reporting Structure
- CEO Direct Report: Most common in customer-centric organizations where experience is a strategic differentiator
- CMO Report: Sometimes found when experience is viewed primarily through a brand lens
- COO Report: Occasionally seen when experience is viewed through an operational excellence lens
Team Structure
The CXO typically leads a multidisciplinary team that may include:
- Experience designers and researchers
- Customer insights and analytics specialists
- Journey managers for key customer segments
- Voice-of-customer program managers
- Service designers
- Experience technology specialists
- Change management experts
Cross-Functional Influence
Regardless of formal reporting lines, the CXO role is inherently cross-functional, requiring strong collaborative relationships with:
- Chief Marketing Officer (brand alignment)
- Chief Information/Technology Officer (experience technology)
- Chief Human Resources Officer (employee experience)
- Chief Product Officer (product experience)
- Chief Operations Officer (service delivery)
The CXO’s Evolving Mandate
The Chief Experience Officer role continues to evolve, with several clear trends emerging:
From Customer-Only to Ecosystem Focus
Early CXO roles often focused exclusively on customer experience. Today’s most effective CXOs take a holistic view that recognizes the interconnected nature of all experiences within the business ecosystem:
- Employee experience as the foundation of customer experience
- Partner and vendor experiences that enable seamless value delivery
- Community experience that extends beyond direct customer relationships
- Shareholder experience that builds trust and long-term investment
From Metrics to Meaning
While experience measurement remains crucial, leading CXOs are moving beyond traditional metrics to focus on creating meaningful connections:
- Balancing quantitative metrics (NPS, CSAT, CES) with qualitative insights
- Focusing on emotional impact and memory creation
- Designing for purpose and values alignment, not just satisfaction
- Creating experiences that reflect authentic brand purpose
From Digital-First to Harmonized Experiences
As digital transformation matures, CXOs are increasingly focused on harmonizing experiences across channels:
- Creating seamless transitions between digital and physical touchpoints
- Ensuring consistent experience quality regardless of channel
- Leveraging digital capabilities to enhance in-person experiences
- Maintaining human connection in increasingly digital journeys
The Background and Skills of Successful CXOs
Chief Experience Officers come from diverse backgrounds, reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of the role. Common career paths include:
Diverse Career Backgrounds
- Customer experience leadership: Having led CX transformation or voice-of-customer programs
- Design leadership: Coming from UX, service design, or design thinking backgrounds
- Marketing leadership: Transitioning from CMO or brand leadership roles
- Digital transformation leadership: Having led digital experience initiatives
- Operations leadership: Moving from COO or operational excellence roles
Essential Skills and Competencies
Regardless of background, successful CXOs typically demonstrate:
- Systems thinking: Ability to understand complex experience ecosystems
- Design thinking: Structured approach to experience innovation
- Change leadership: Capability to drive organizational transformation
- Data fluency: Comfort with experience metrics and analytics
- Business acumen: Understanding how experience drives business outcomes
- Technological literacy: Familiarity with experience technology landscape
- Emotional intelligence: Empathy for customer and employee needs
- Storytelling ability: Skill in articulating experience vision and priorities
When Organizations Need a Chief Experience Officer
Not every company requires a dedicated CXO. This role typically becomes necessary when:
Organizational Triggers
- Experience fragmentation: Customer journeys cross multiple departments creating inconsistency
- Digital transformation: Major shifts in how customers interact with the company
- Competitive pressure: Experience becoming a key competitive battlefield
- Growth challenges: Scaling while maintaining experience quality
- Brand-experience gaps: Disconnect between brand promises and delivered experiences
Industry Patterns
While CXOs can be found across sectors, they are most common in:
- Healthcare: Where patient experience directly impacts outcomes and regulations increasingly tie reimbursement to experience measures
- Financial services: As traditional institutions compete with experience-focused fintech disruptors
- Retail and hospitality: Industries where experience has always been central to value proposition.
- In eCommerce, for instance, experience-driven growth can include post-purchase touchpoints like referral programs. Tools like ReferralCandy or the best Wix referral apps, let CXOs design referral experiences that feel rewarding and on-brand, helping retain customers while driving new ones through authentic word-of-mouth.
- SaaS and technology: Where product experience and customer success directly drive retention
- Professional services: Where client experience is inseparable from the service itself
Measuring CXO Success
How should organizations evaluate their Chief Experience Officer’s impact? Key indicators include:
Experience Metrics
- Improvements in traditional experience measures (NPS, CSAT, CES)
- Reduced customer effort across journeys
- Higher employee engagement and satisfaction
- Improved experience consistency across touchpoints
- Enhanced journey completion rates
Business Outcomes
- Increased customer retention and reduced churn
- Higher conversion rates at key journey stages
- Improved cross-sell and upsell rates
- Enhanced price premium sustainability
- Reduced cost-to-serve through better experiences
Organizational Capabilities
- More effective cross-functional collaboration
- Improved experience design capabilities
- Enhanced customer-centricity across the organization
- More efficient experience delivery
- Greater innovation around experience differentiation
CXO Challenges and How They Overcome Them
The Chief Experience Officer role comes with significant challenges:
Common Obstacles
- Organizational resistance: Functional silos protecting their territories
- ROI pressure: Demands for short-term financial justification of experience investments
- Technology fragmentation: Disconnected systems creating experience gaps
- Change fatigue: Difficulty sustaining organizational focus on experience
- Competing priorities: Experience initiatives versus other business objectives
Successful Strategies
Effective CXOs address these challenges by:
- Connecting experience to business results: Demonstrating clear ROI of experience improvements
- Building cross-functional governance: Creating shared ownership for experience outcomes
- Focusing on quick wins alongside strategic initiatives: Balancing short and long-term impact
- Leveraging technology strategically: Implementing experience management platforms to unify data and insights
- Cultivating executive sponsorship: Ensuring CEO and board-level commitment to experience
The Future of the Chief Experience Officer Role
As the CXO role continues to evolve, several future directions are emerging:
Expanding Scope
- Greater focus on responsible experience design that considers ethics, inclusivity, and sustainability
- Increased attention to employee experience as talent markets remain competitive
- Growing emphasis on ecosystem experiences that extend beyond traditional boundaries
Technology Integration
- Deeper involvement in experience technology architecture
- Greater focus on AI-enabled experiences that personalize at scale and prioritize brand management
- Leadership in immersive experiences (AR/VR) and voice interfaces
Strategic Elevation
- More CXOs taking on broader transformation leadership
- Increased presence of CXOs on paths to CEO roles
- Growing number of board positions focused on experience oversight
Is Your Organization Ready for a Chief Experience Officer?
Consider these questions when evaluating whether your organization needs a dedicated CXO:
- Is experience a strategic differentiator in your market?
- Do your customer journeys cross multiple functional areas creating consistency challenges?
- Are there significant gaps between your brand promises and delivered experiences?
- Does your organization struggle to connect employee and customer experiences?
- Is your experience improvement work fragmented across multiple uncoordinated initiatives?
- Does experience transformation require C-level authority to succeed?
If you answered yes to several of these questions, your organization might benefit from establishing a Chief Experience Officer role.
Conclusion: The CXO as Experience Orchestrator
The Chief Experience Officer represents more than just another addition to an already crowded C-suite. In the most successful implementations, the CXO serves as the orchestrator of experiences across the entire organization—ensuring that customers, employees, and partners experience the brand in consistent, meaningful, and differentiated ways.
As experience increasingly becomes the primary battlefield for competitive advantage, the CXO role will continue to evolve and grow in importance. The most effective CXOs will be those who can balance the art and science of experience—combining empathy and creativity with data and technology to create experiences that don’t just satisfy, but truly transform relationships with the organization.
For companies serious about experience as a strategic priority, the question is no longer whether they need a Chief Experience Officer, but rather how quickly they can empower this crucial role to drive organization-wide experience transformation.
How has your organization approached experience leadership? Does a dedicated CXO make sense in your context? Share your thoughts in the comments below.