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 works across departments to improve the interactions people have with an organization. The title alone does not establish which people the role serves, what authority it has, or whom it reports to; the written job description does.
What does a chief experience officer do?
A CXO typically connects an organization’s experience goals with the work of the teams that shape them. Instead of treating experience as the responsibility of one support or service group, the role may coordinate improvements across products, services, communications, and other points in a customer journey.
- Set direction: Define or coordinate an experience strategy and connect it to the organization’s priorities. A New York State agency job description, for example, says its Customer Experience Officer sets strategic vision and direction for customer experience across the agency. That is one agency’s role definition, not a universal standard.
- Represent people’s needs: Bring customer needs and feedback into decisions about product development and service delivery.
- Coordinate across touchpoints: Work with the functions responsible for different stages of the experience, rather than focusing only on one channel or department.
- Measure and improve: Use feedback, journey insight, and performance measures to find problems and assess initiatives. The relevant measures depend on the organization’s objectives.
- Build support for change: Secure cooperation across teams whose decisions affect the experience.
These are common areas of responsibility, not guaranteed powers. A CXO title by itself does not promise a dedicated team, budget, veto, or specific decision rights.
Does CXO always mean customer experience?
No. In many business contexts, “chief experience officer” refers to customer experience, but some organizations use the title for employee experience, patient experience, or another group’s experience. Public-sector organizations may also use “Customer Experience Officer” for an agency-wide customer remit.
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Check the job description for the role’s audience and scope. “Experience” is too broad to identify the remit reliably without that context.
Who does a chief experience officer report to?
There is no single reporting line established as a standard. TechTarget describes CXOs as typically reporting to a CEO, COO, or CMO, but that is general guidance rather than a rule. McKinsey’s governance analysis argues that direct access to the CEO can signal priority and help a chief customer officer influence other functions; it also emphasizes the need for CEO support. That argument does not mean every CXO must report directly to the CEO.
For any particular role, look at its reporting line and access to the executives who control the functions it must coordinate. A broad remit without sufficient executive support may make cross-functional change harder to deliver.
Why does cross-functional authority matter?
Experience is shaped by decisions made in multiple parts of an organization. A CXO may identify a journey problem, but resolving it can require product, operations, marketing, service, or technology teams to change how they work. The role’s ability to convene those teams and obtain executive backing can therefore matter as much as its title.
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Deloitte Digital reported in a 2025 publication that 86% of executives cited ineffective collaboration as a contributor to business failures. That figure concerns executives’ views of collaboration; it is not a measure of CXO performance.
How to evaluate a specific CXO role
When comparing job descriptions or deciding what a CXO position actually entails, assess the written mandate across these areas:
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- Author: Bungay Stanier, Michael.
- Publisher: Page Two
- Pages: 244
- Publication Date: 2016-02-29
- Edition: 1
- Whose experience is in scope? Identify whether the role covers customers, employees, patients, or another group.
- Where does it sit? Confirm the reporting line and whether the CXO has access to senior leaders who can support work across functions.
- What can it decide? Look for explicit decision rights, budget, team, and authority to convene or direct other groups. Do not infer them from “chief” in the title.
- Which functions and journey stages are covered? Determine whether the remit spans the full experience or only selected channels, services, or departments.
- What is it accountable for? Check whether the role owns listening programs, experience measures, improvement initiatives, business outcomes, or some combination.
These are practical questions for interpreting a role, not a formal industry scorecard. The available sources do not establish a universal CXO team size, authority model, or reporting structure.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Further reading on customer-experience leadership
For a related practical framework, Wiley describes Jeanne Bliss’s Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine as a customer-experience roadmap for customer leadership executives, organized around five competencies. It is an adjacent resource on customer leadership, not a definitive guide to every role called CXO.
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