CXO: 7 Responsibilities of a Chief Experience Officer

A chief experience officer, or CXO, oversees and facilitates positive customer and employee experiences for their brands. They do so by creating personalized experiences for a company’s client or customer base and its internal staff. This C-suite position generally oversees other customer experience officers like UX professionals, marketing associates, and other creatives. The job title is sometimes interchangeable with chief customer officer (CCO) or chief marketing officer (CMO).

Chief experience officers need education, experience, and an innate ability to understand what makes people tick. Consider these four core qualifications for CXOs:

1. 1. People skills: To implement effective customer experience or CX strategies, CXOs need to understand human behavior and appeal to human desires. By studying what makes for a positive overall experience for people in a general sense, CXOs can extrapolate from that to create specific customer or employee experiences tailored to their brands.
2. 2. Previous experience: CXOs often work as associates in marketing (or customer experience) departments before becoming executives. This might mean running social media for a healthcare provider, doing UX design for a software company, or something else entirely. Learning how to think creatively and interact with people positively and effectively are the most important touchpoints to hit as an aspiring CXO.
3. 3. Prior education: Obtaining a bachelor’s or master’s degree in business administration, communications, marketing, or public relations may boost your chances of becoming a chief experience officer. By combining education with direct experience, you can help set yourself up for success.
4. 4. Problem-solving abilities: To excel in your chief experience officer job, you’ll need to be able to think creatively and decisively to solve problems. The goal of this career is to reduce any negative experiences your customers or employees might have as they interface with your products or services while also increasing the positive experiences. This requires confident decision-making, constant adaptability, and plenty of creativity.

Chief experience officers need to wear a lot of hats. These seven responsibilities are essential elements of CXO job descriptions:

1. 1. Being collaborative with other executives: As C-level employees, CXOs interact directly with fellow executive staff, vice presidents, and so on. They work with the chief operating officer (COO) and chief technology officer (CTO) to ensure the customer experience process integrates with day-to-day tasks and software development, respectively. They generally report directly to the chief executive officer (CEO) on successes and pain points, while collaborating with the chief financial officer (CFO) to ensure they’re staying within budget.
2. 2. Defining value propositions: The CXO position defines precisely what a company offers to its customers. These value propositions serve as the genesis point for any further metrics by which to measure customer success and engagement. If a customer doesn’t feel like they’re getting what they want from the company, the CXO does what they can to take the company back to the drawing board to more effectively meet the customer’s needs.
3. 3. Developing a customer journey map: This form of business strategy revolves around defining the average customer life cycle. The CXO asks what the company can do to attract a customer initially, satisfy them, encourage retention, and get them to tell other potential customers about their positive experience with the brand. Sometimes, CXOs create individual experience strategies like this for unique customer profiles or personas (hypothetical demographics with whom they’re hoping to engage).
4. 4. Interfacing with customers directly: CXOs need to do all they can to understand their customer base as well as possible. Interfacing with customers as stakeholders in their own right will help you succeed as a CXO. This might involve doing direct outreach, surveying customers’ experiences with your brand, monitoring individual customer interactions, and aligning priorities to best meet their needs.
5. 5. Motivating and managing team members: Customer satisfaction is just half of the CXO’s purview—employee satisfaction is just as important. CXOs work with human resources, the project management team, and others to ensure their customer experience team has positive interactions at the company. With optimized well-being, employees become the most effective brand ambassadors possible.
6. 6. Prioritizing user experience: The product development landscape has undergone a digital transformation. Meeting customer expectations increasingly requires a positive user experience online via apps and websites. No matter what products or services your brand sells, you likely have a digital footprint for them (or you should). The role of the CXO is to follow through on customer experience initiatives by working with the UX and social media team to ensure Internet users interact positively with your content.
7. 7. Review regularly. You’ll need to revise and review content, practices, and processes routinely in your CXO role. Measure your company’s performance against key performance indicators (KPIs) to see how you can make improvements to customer experience. One small change can be a big differentiator when it comes to brand success.

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