The Emergence of the Chief Experience Officer (CXO)
CxO is traditionally an initialism for a group of chief officers—such as chief executive officer, chief technology officer, chief financial officer—who head various strategic functions in an organization, most of whom end up reporting to the chief executive officer. However, recently the idea of the CXO (replacing “x” with “X”) is beginning to emerge. The CXO is a chief experience officer who heads customer experience and is sometimes called the chief customer officer.
While the CXO title continues to emerge and change in organizations—and often referred to by different names—the role has become very lucid with a clear focus on the end customer. It has taken the customer experience from a reactive position to a completely proactive position, with a clear goal of minimizing the overall number of customer service calls, which is a measurable key result area for the CXO.
The CXO role is crossfunctional in an organization, but some domains such as banking, insurance, and health care have taken a lead in implementing it more often than have other organizations. However, others are quickly following in their footsteps. For example, one of the first strategic changes the new CEO at Microsoft made was to move the previous head of devices, Julie Larson Green, into the role of chief experience officer.
As it evolves, the CXO role is still gaining traction. CEOs have had to explain what the role entails and why it is important for their organization—as The Washington Post’s CEO did a few years back. With customer-centric development and a carefully built brand loyalty becoming key differentiators for organizations in an increasingly competitive marketplace, the CXO role is becoming an inevitable and invaluable one that organizations are creating to gain competitive advantage.
The CXO role is typically filled with someone internal to the organization rather than an external hire, as these people have really grown with the organization and understand the various functions—such as marketing, operations, and customer service—specific to their organization’s constraints and style of operations.
The industry needs to address the concern of whether “too many chiefs spoil the company.” The number of CxOs who report to a CEO has increased from four in 1986 to seven in 2000. Every new CxO role has a lot of weight tagged to it from operational, financial, and organizational morale standpoints. Also, although organizations have typically added a CxO role after diligent analysis, removing a CxO is still not a common practice.
So as CXOs begin to show measurable value, each organization must decide if such a position really makes sense. At this time, the CXO role still continues to be custom-created rather than a universally-accepted.
