A chief experience officer (CXO) is a senior executive who leads or coordinates an organization’s strategy for improving experience—most often the customer experience. The CXO brings customer needs into executive decisions and helps teams across the organization improve the interactions people have with its products and services. The title alone does not establish which audience the role serves or what authority it has; the written job description does.
What does a chief experience officer do?
A CXO connects an organization’s priorities to the experience it delivers. Rather than owning only one service channel, the role commonly coordinates work across functions and stages of the customer journey.
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- Set experience direction: Define or coordinate an experience strategy and relate it to organizational priorities. A New York State agency job description, for example, assigns its Customer Experience Officer responsibility for setting the agency-wide strategic vision and direction for customer experience. Read the New York State job description.
- Represent customer needs: Bring customer feedback and needs into executive, product-development, and service-delivery decisions.
- Coordinate across the journey: Work with the teams responsible for different touchpoints, rather than treating experience as the job of a single support or service team.
- Measure and improve: Use feedback, journey insights, and performance measures to identify problems and assess initiatives. Which measures matter depends on the organization’s objectives.
- Build support for change: Secure cooperation across functions so improvements can be implemented beyond the CXO’s own team.
Does CXO always mean customer experience?
No. Business sources commonly use “chief experience officer” for customer experience, but organizations may use the same title for responsibility for employee, patient, or another group’s experience. New York State, for instance, uses the title “Customer Experience Officer” for an agency-wide customer remit. Its official role description is an example, not a universal definition.
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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesWhen evaluating a specific role, check whose experience is in scope and which journey stages or services it covers. Do not infer the remit from “CXO” alone.
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Who does a chief experience officer report to?
There is no single established reporting line. TechTarget describes CXOs as typically reporting to a CEO, COO, or CMO, but that is general guidance rather than a rule. TechTarget’s overview of the CXO role also describes the role’s journey-wide coordination.
McKinsey’s analysis of chief customer officers argues that direct CEO access can signal the importance of customer experience and help the executive influence other functions. It also emphasizes the need for CEO support to execute cross-functional work. That is a governance argument, not evidence that every CXO should report to the CEO. Read McKinsey’s analysis.
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What authority does the title give a CXO?
The title does not guarantee a budget, team, veto, or particular decision rights. The sources do not establish a universal benchmark for CXO team size or authority. A role with broad responsibility but little executive access or influence over the teams that own customer touchpoints may struggle to carry out its mandate; the reporting structure and written authority matter alongside the title.
When comparing a job description or organization chart, examine these points:
- Audience: Is the remit customer, employee, patient, or another experience?
- Access: Who does the CXO report to, and how does the role participate in executive decisions?
- Authority and resources: What decisions, budget, and team are explicitly assigned?
- Coverage: Which functions, channels, and stages of the experience fall within the remit?
- Accountability: Is the CXO responsible for listening and measurement, specific improvements, or defined business outcomes?
These are practical questions for assessing a particular role, not a standardized scorecard.
Why does cross-functional support matter?
Experience is shaped by work across departments, so a CXO’s influence depends on cooperation from the teams that design products, deliver services, and manage customer touchpoints. In a report published on 11 February 2025, Deloitte Digital said 86% of executives cited ineffective collaboration as a contributor to business failures. That figure describes executives’ views of collaboration; it is not a measure of CXO performance. Read Deloitte Digital’s discussion of the evolving CXO role.
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For anyone assessing a CXO position, the practical question is whether the executive has sponsorship and working relationships that let the role coordinate improvements across organizational boundaries—not simply whether “chief” appears in the title.
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Further reading on customer-experience leadership
For a practical adjacent resource, Jeanne Bliss’s Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine presents a customer-experience roadmap for customer leadership executives and a five-competency framework. It is one approach to customer leadership, not a universal definition of the CXO role. See Wiley’s book description.
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- Author: Bungay Stanier, Michael.
- Publisher: Page Two
- Pages: 244
- Publication Date: 2016-02-29
- Edition: 1
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