By Todd Unger, Chief Experience Officer, and author of The 10-Second Customer Journey
When I first started the role of Chief Experience Officer (CXO) back in 2017, I got a lot of questions from my friends and colleagues. What exactly does a Chief Experience Officer do? What is customer experience?
To understand how others saw and defined the role, I did the same thing I’d done years before when I became a Chief Digital Officer: I Googled it.
What I found didn’t exactly provide me with definitive direction or insight. The CXO job descriptions I found then were vague and varied, either too broad or narrow. Some were focused more on customer service, which is part of customer experience. Some definitions were more rooted in important leadership qualities like “being collaborative with other executives” rather than specific guidance about the job to be done. None of them focused on growth.
The lack of a formal definition of the role was particularly interesting because the prevalence of the Chief Experience Office role was already significant and growing. According to Gartner, in 2017, nearly 65% of organizations reported that they had a Chief Experience Officer (CXO) or Chief Customer Officer. By 2019, this had grown to nearly 90%.
Fast-forward to today, and the definitions are improving, but they still don’t necessarily capture what I’d call a “working definition” aka, what a CXO actually does day to day. Here are three definitions I found in a recent search:
“A Chief Experience Officer, or “CXO,” is a corporate or C-Suite executive responsible for enhancing the overall customer experience... Primarily, the goal of the Chief Experience Officer is to foster brand and customer loyalty and drive a customer-centric approach to business operations.”
“A chief experience officer (CXO) is an executive in the C-suite who ensures positive interactions with an organization's customers…A CXO is primarily responsible for overseeing an organization's customer experience strategy, fostering brand and customer loyalty and ensuring a customer-centric approach to business operations.
“A chief experience officer…helps businesses create a better customer experience. They serve as customer ambassador, connecting companies with their customers, improving customer relations, and contributing to business growth.”
A few observations about these definitions.
First, to understand the role of the CXO, you’ll need a clear understanding of “customer experience.” As I shared in a prior post, (add link to blog post about what is customer experience) customer experience is not exactly the easiest thing to define, especially in a world transformed by digital.
Second, the CXO is about making an organization “customer-centric” in its business operations.
Third, these definitions have begun to tie the CXO role to growth and improved customer loyalty (retention).
The question remains, how?
For me, the breakthrough in understanding about the role started with a working definition of customer experience itself. In 2019, on my third anniversary at AMA, I published my own take: “Customer experience is the seamless integration of marketing, product, commerce, and service to acquire and retain customers.”
This is not only a practical definition of customer experience, but also a description of what I do every day: orchestrate the four elements of Customer Experience (marketing, product, commerce and service) to grow and retain customers. The title made a lot more sense to me when I stopped thinking of the “X” in CXO as “experience” and started thinking about “putting the X in CXO.” In other words, orchestrating the four corners of customer experience (the “X”) to bring the Customer (the “C”) and the Organization (the “O”) together in pursuit of growth.
In The 10-Second Customer Journey, I provide a step-by-step playbook for orchestrating customer experience, stamping out customer friction at every point and unlocking growth. It’s a more expansive view of customer experience than you might think, and essential to success in today’s fast paced digital environment, where customers make their decisions in seconds. Order your copy today!
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