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Customer Experience futurist, Blake Morgan, recently wrote an article for Forbes titled, "The Case Against a Chief Customer Officer."
In it, Morgan argues that creating the role of Chief Customer Officer or Chief Experience Officer (CCO and CXO, respectively) is often just paying lip service to the idea of customer-centricity. It's a solid point.
I posted the article on LinkedIn and there was a lively discussion. Some people agreed Morgan was spot-on, while others disagreed and advocated for a CXO role. Unfortunately, data and examples were slim.
So I decided to find some data, or at least a few examples, that could answer whether having a CXO makes sense.
Do customer-centric companies have a CXO?
The short answer is not necessarily.
Some do, but not all. And there's a huge variable that seems to determine whether this role is actually successful. (More on that in a moment.)
I'll be the first to admit my study is narrow, but it's a start. There are 11 customer-centric companies profiled in my book, The Service Culture Handbook, so I decided to examine them.
How many of these companies have a senior level executive whose title is CCO, CXO, or something substantially similar?
The answer is 36 percent, or 4 out of 11.
When does having a CXO make sense?
Another way to look at the small sample of customer-focused companies from The Service Culture Handbook is 7 out of 11 do not have a CXO. Yet these companies like REI, Shake Shack, and Zendesk are all highly customer-focused.
There's one variable that seems to determine whether a CXO role makes sense for a company: whether or not that person has functional responsibilities.
All of the CXOs in Service Culture companies oversee some specific function.
Ian Deason, Sr. Vice President of Customer Experience at JetBlue, oversees all customer-facing operations. This includes the airports, customer support, and inflight departments.
Brooke Skinner Rickettes, Chief Experience Officer at Cars.com, is in charge of marketing. She also leads strategy for product and design.
I've talked with several CXOs off the record who were without any functional responsibilities. In each case, they expressed frustration about being unable to effectively influence other parts of the company. It seemed the CEO had delegated customer experience by creating the role, and other executives ignored it because it wasn't their responsibility.
Take Action
The real question for your business is not, "Should we add a CXO?"
Adding one doesn’t automatically make your company more customer-centric. Not having one doesn’t mean your company can’t have a strong service culture, either.
A better question is, "What governance structure best fits our strategy?" It doesn't make sense to create a CXO position if they don't have a specific role to play.