The CXO Handbook is a CX Pilots study of 67 interviews with customer experience leaders, chief executives, and front-line employees, 34 of them in professional services. It finds that outperforming enterprises share three traits: a short distance between the boardroom and the customer, a collective ambition around the customer imperative, and the ability to pause, reset the CX function, and set a renewed course. The handbook concentrates on the third trait and lays out a five-step reset: a new CX agenda, a 100-day alignment plan, a focus on the CX nucleus, a reorganized CX ecosystem, and a revised set of performance measures.
A Chief Experience Officer (CXO) is the senior executive accountable for the end-to-end experience customers have with an organization, across every channel, interaction, and stage of the customer journey. Some organizations use the title Chief Customer Experience Officer (CCEO) or Chief Customer Officer (CCO) for the same scope. The role integrates customer strategy, experience design, measurement, and governance under a single mandate, and it typically reports to the CEO or sits on the executive committee.
In the handbook's framing, the CXO's number one job is to engineer greater satisfaction into the customer experience and friction out of it, grow aggregate customer lifetime value (CLV), and scale that effort across the organization. The role is still a relatively new field, which explains why many CX leaders know what to do and why, and struggle mainly with how to get it done with the resources at hand.
The core responsibilities of a CXO fall into five areas:
Chief Experience Officer and Chief Customer Officer are often used interchangeably, and Gartner groups them with equivalent roles in its research. A CXO tends to emphasize experience design across the full journey, including employee and digital touchpoints, while a CCO tends to emphasize customer relationships, retention, and revenue. The role also differs from the Chief Marketing Officer, who owns brand and demand generation, and from the Chief Digital Officer, who owns digital channels and technology.
A note on terminology: "CXO" is also used informally as shorthand for any C-level executive (CEO, CFO, COO, and so on). In this handbook, CXO means Chief Experience Officer.
Experience is now a board-level performance variable. Gartner reported that more than 35% of organizations lacked a Chief Experience Officer, Chief Customer Officer, or equivalent title in 2017, and that more than 90% had someone in the role by 2020. The handbook also cites Harvard Business Review research in which 71% of business leaders believe customer experience is the next battleground, and Towers Watson and Gallup research associating strong employee engagement with operating margins three times higher than those of businesses with poor engagement.
Experience-centric organizations outperform their markets, which raises the question the handbook answers: what do the leaders inside those organizations actually do, and how do they correct course when a CX program stalls? To find out, we interviewed leaders from top performing organizations to learn the strategy and principles behind leading experience-centric organizations.
The handbook draws on 67 interviews with customer experience leaders, chief executives, and employees on the front lines of CX. We asked Chief Customer Executives and CX leaders to name their greatest challenges in establishing or optimizing their companies' CX programs. Their answers exposed the relationships among the boardroom, chief executives, management, employees, customers, and the brand experience itself. The research isolates the core elements of stress, friction, and success in setting up, managing, and optimizing CX management programs.
Professional services firms account for roughly half of the sample, which makes the findings directly relevant to insurance, legal, accounting, and architecture, engineering, and construction firms. Marketing leaders hold 47 of the 67 titles represented, so the findings reflect the view from the CMO suite as much as from dedicated CX roles.
The interviews surfaced three patterns that separate outperforming enterprises from underperforming ones. The handbook frames the value of a CX decision as the product of three variables: decision value, consensus across each organizational layer (boardroom, executives, management, employees), and the distance of the decision from the customer.
When it comes to critical CX funding and CX program initiatives, outperforming enterprises have a significantly shorter distance between the boardroom and the customer. For a practical treatment of how this translates into planning, see our guide to CX strategy roadmaps.
Outperforming organizations share a collective ambition around the customer imperative within a customer-centric culture. Our program roadmap and strategy service applies this principle to enterprise CX programs.
Outperforming organizations can hit pause, reset the CX function, regroup, and set a renewed course that empowers CX leaders and employees with fresh and updated strategies. The handbook concentrates on this third pattern: hitting reset and building more powerful coalitions that can execute against the priorities that move the organization from stagnant to stellar in the shortest amount of time.
One of the biggest execution challenges the interviews exposed is for those coalitions to decide what infrastructure the move from stagnant to stellar requires.
CX leaders reached consensus on several points. They no longer treat technology and platforms as a panacea, and they prioritize reducing friction in key decisions and executing with a shared sense of accountability for the customer experience. They want authority to operate without excessive rules, because customers can feel when an employee is trusted by leadership. They treat CX operations strategy as mission-critical, with team and process structure as important as data. They see voice of the customer (VoC) platform roll-outs as fundamental to a data-led strategy, and they see journey analytics and orchestration playing a growing role in CX delivery.
The same leaders described gaps emerging in the management of their programs:
The interviews isolated four execution challenges for CX coalitions: a lack of customer service experience in the CX effort, a lack of data management (including survey collation, behavioral analytics, and a VoC platform that centralizes insight), a lack of integration with technology and IT reference architecture, and a lack of design thinking in product, service, and experience delivery. On the last point, the handbook points to the telecommunications operator Du, which built an internal Design Academy and a north star of design principles, and to Turkcell and Baloise as service design-led models.
The CEOs we interviewed held one of two attitudes. Some understand the criticality of CX, have faith in their CX leaders, and know they need to increase support and funding without yet knowing by how much or when. Others feel they are doing fine and that CX is as important as every other organizational concern. Our bets are with the CEOs who are raising their priorities around CX.
One CEO put the stakes plainly: "If we're going to innovate at all, we're going to innovate around the Customer Experience, first." The handbook's position follows from that view: CX is innovation, and an organization with funded innovation efforts but no funded CX effort is operating with a 1990s model.
For CEOs who want to support their CX leaders, the handbook recommends moving CX into the boardroom, asking the CFO to offer more support and less scrutiny early on, bringing HR in to build skills and capabilities, redesigning CX governance so reporting matches activity, establishing a measurement and bonusing regime around CX, and issuing a CX charter that signals total CEO support.
The handbook's reset framework gives a CXO a sequence for rebuilding a stalled CX function. It rests on one framing choice: call the effort a reset, because the label change will work against you.
Start by deconstructing the CEO's goals for your position and breaking them into individual paths for the first 100, 200, and 300 days. Hold reset meetings with peers before anyone else, beginning with the CFO and the leaders of sales and business development, marketing, and product, service, and innovation. Bring HR in early, define a project that quickly demonstrates the value of CX, and roadmap the integration of VoC data with action. Then work through the foundational reset questions:
The first 100 days are about alignment. The handbook sequences it by month:
The handbook also supplies a seven-part alignment script for these conversations, from announcing the reset and requesting help to setting a transparent drumbeat of internal communication.
The CX leader makes the case for owning three tightly wound elements: the cultural axis shift toward customer experience, the customer experience itself, and the product and service interfaces. The people met during the first 100 days form a CX Supergroup that lays out the vision for the reset. Three activities join the elements and unlock positive attitudes around CX: employee engagement, CX innovation, and content marketing.
The handbook reorganizes CX functions into four human-centered areas instead of organization-centric ones:
Feel: Internal and external brand experience, design interface, digital and offline CX delivery, and employee engagement in support of CX
Voice: Social listening, VoC, contact center, editorial planning, and distribution channels
Activation: Content, search, loyalty and retention, and interactions with real people
Measurement: Strategy and metrics for internal and external performance, CRM data, and analytics environments
Whether the reset runs through centralized control or decentralized enablement depends on CX maturity. A firm new to CX benefits from a more centralized reset that establishes the right interfaces, while a mature organization with existing buy-in can decentralize.
Create two sets of measures: a comprehensive set that the Supergroup uses to determine real progress, and a high-level set shared with the entire company. Company-wide measures include percentage increases in Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Aggregate Revenue from CX (ARCX), positive customer experience and satisfaction, and brand strength, along with percentage decreases in customer effort and regular NPS, CSAT, or CES reporting by critical-to-quality aspects of the experience. Agree with the CEO in advance on exactly how performance will be judged at six and 12 months, and use a VoC platform as the single source of truth. The strategic objective is to shift CX from a cost center to a value center.
The handbook is written for Chief Experience Officers, Chief Customer Officers, CMOs, COOs, and CX directors at mid-market and enterprise organizations, including professional services firms in insurance, legal, accounting, and architecture, engineering, and construction. It serves leaders building a CX program and leaders restructuring one that has stalled.
A Chief Experience Officer is the executive accountable for the end-to-end customer experience across every channel and stage of the journey. The role combines experience strategy, governance, measurement, and funding under one mandate.
The titles are often used interchangeably. A CXO usually emphasizes experience design across the full journey, while a Chief Customer Officer usually emphasizes customer relationships, retention, and revenue.
Gartner reported that more than 90% of organizations had a CXO, Chief Customer Officer, or equivalent title by 2020, after more than 35% lacked the role in 2017. The role continues to grow.
The handbook identifies three patterns. Outperforming enterprises have a shorter distance between the boardroom and the customer on CX funding and initiatives, share a collective ambition around the customer imperative, and can pause, reset the CX function, and set a renewed course.
A CX reset is a deliberate pause to regroup and set a renewed course, with fresh strategies that empower CX leaders and employees. The handbook structures it in five steps: reset the CX agenda, reset the 100-day plan, focus on the CX nucleus, reset the CX ecosystem, and reset the performance measures.
The handbook organizes the work around paths for the first 100, 200, and 300 days, with the first 100 days devoted to alignment. Month 1 covers the CEO and the heads of marketing, sales, and operations, Month 2 covers HR, finance, IT, and innovation, and Month 3 covers customer-facing sales work, segmentation, and a CX Center of Excellence.
The handbook recommends two measurement sets. The company-wide set emphasizes Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Aggregate Revenue from CX (ARCX), alongside customer effort and NPS, CSAT, or CES scores by critical-to-quality aspects of the experience.
CXOs, Chief Customer Officers, CMOs, COOs, and CX directors who are building a new CX program or restructuring an existing one.
The handbook is based on 67 interviews with CX leaders, chief executives, and front-line employees, 34 of them in professional services. It was produced by CX Pilots, a customer experience consultancy serving mid-market and enterprise professional services firms.
• When it comes to critical CX funding and CX program initiatives, the distance that exists between the boardroom and the customer is significantly shorter.
• The organization shares collective ambition around the customer imperative within a customer-centric culture.
• The organization can hit pause, reset the CX function, regroup, and set a renewed course that empowers CX leaders and employees with fresh and updated strategies.
The CXO Handbook is a CX Pilots study of 67 interviews with customer experience leaders, chief executives, and front-line employees, 34 of them in professional services. It finds that outperforming enterprises share three traits: a short distance between the boardroom and the customer, a collective ambition around the customer imperative, and the ability to pause, reset the CX function, and set a renewed course. The handbook concentrates on the third trait and lays out a five-step reset: a new CX agenda, a 100-day alignment plan, a focus on the CX nucleus, a reorganized CX ecosystem, and a revised set of performance measures.
A Chief Experience Officer (CXO) is the senior executive accountable for the end-to-end experience customers have with an organization, across every channel, interaction, and stage of the customer journey. Some organizations use the title Chief Customer Experience Officer (CCEO) or Chief Customer Officer (CCO) for the same scope. The role integrates customer strategy, experience design, measurement, and governance under a single mandate, and it typically reports to the CEO or sits on the executive committee.
In the handbook's framing, the CXO's number one job is to engineer greater satisfaction into the customer experience and friction out of it, grow aggregate customer lifetime value (CLV), and scale that effort across the organization. The role is still a relatively new field, which explains why many CX leaders know what to do and why, and struggle mainly with how to get it done with the resources at hand.
The core responsibilities of a CXO fall into five areas:
Chief Experience Officer and Chief Customer Officer are often used interchangeably, and Gartner groups them with equivalent roles in its research. A CXO tends to emphasize experience design across the full journey, including employee and digital touchpoints, while a CCO tends to emphasize customer relationships, retention, and revenue. The role also differs from the Chief Marketing Officer, who owns brand and demand generation, and from the Chief Digital Officer, who owns digital channels and technology.
A note on terminology: "CXO" is also used informally as shorthand for any C-level executive (CEO, CFO, COO, and so on). In this handbook, CXO means Chief Experience Officer.
Experience is now a board-level performance variable. Gartner reported that more than 35% of organizations lacked a Chief Experience Officer, Chief Customer Officer, or equivalent title in 2017, and that more than 90% had someone in the role by 2020. The handbook also cites Harvard Business Review research in which 71% of business leaders believe customer experience is the next battleground, and Towers Watson and Gallup research associating strong employee engagement with operating margins three times higher than those of businesses with poor engagement.
Experience-centric organizations outperform their markets, which raises the question the handbook answers: what do the leaders inside those organizations actually do, and how do they correct course when a CX program stalls? To find out, we interviewed leaders from top performing organizations to learn the strategy and principles behind leading experience-centric organizations.
The handbook draws on 67 interviews with customer experience leaders, chief executives, and employees on the front lines of CX. We asked Chief Customer Executives and CX leaders to name their greatest challenges in establishing or optimizing their companies' CX programs. Their answers exposed the relationships among the boardroom, chief executives, management, employees, customers, and the brand experience itself. The research isolates the core elements of stress, friction, and success in setting up, managing, and optimizing CX management programs.
Professional services firms account for roughly half of the sample, which makes the findings directly relevant to insurance, legal, accounting, and architecture, engineering, and construction firms. Marketing leaders hold 47 of the 67 titles represented, so the findings reflect the view from the CMO suite as much as from dedicated CX roles.
The interviews surfaced three patterns that separate outperforming enterprises from underperforming ones. The handbook frames the value of a CX decision as the product of three variables: decision value, consensus across each organizational layer (boardroom, executives, management, employees), and the distance of the decision from the customer.
When it comes to critical CX funding and CX program initiatives, outperforming enterprises have a significantly shorter distance between the boardroom and the customer. For a practical treatment of how this translates into planning, see our guide to CX strategy roadmaps.
Outperforming organizations share a collective ambition around the customer imperative within a customer-centric culture. Our program roadmap and strategy service applies this principle to enterprise CX programs.
Outperforming organizations can hit pause, reset the CX function, regroup, and set a renewed course that empowers CX leaders and employees with fresh and updated strategies. The handbook concentrates on this third pattern: hitting reset and building more powerful coalitions that can execute against the priorities that move the organization from stagnant to stellar in the shortest amount of time.
One of the biggest execution challenges the interviews exposed is for those coalitions to decide what infrastructure the move from stagnant to stellar requires.
CX leaders reached consensus on several points. They no longer treat technology and platforms as a panacea, and they prioritize reducing friction in key decisions and executing with a shared sense of accountability for the customer experience. They want authority to operate without excessive rules, because customers can feel when an employee is trusted by leadership. They treat CX operations strategy as mission-critical, with team and process structure as important as data. They see voice of the customer (VoC) platform roll-outs as fundamental to a data-led strategy, and they see journey analytics and orchestration playing a growing role in CX delivery.
The same leaders described gaps emerging in the management of their programs:
The interviews isolated four execution challenges for CX coalitions: a lack of customer service experience in the CX effort, a lack of data management (including survey collation, behavioral analytics, and a VoC platform that centralizes insight), a lack of integration with technology and IT reference architecture, and a lack of design thinking in product, service, and experience delivery. On the last point, the handbook points to the telecommunications operator Du, which built an internal Design Academy and a north star of design principles, and to Turkcell and Baloise as service design-led models.
The CEOs we interviewed held one of two attitudes. Some understand the criticality of CX, have faith in their CX leaders, and know they need to increase support and funding without yet knowing by how much or when. Others feel they are doing fine and that CX is as important as every other organizational concern. Our bets are with the CEOs who are raising their priorities around CX.
One CEO put the stakes plainly: "If we're going to innovate at all, we're going to innovate around the Customer Experience, first." The handbook's position follows from that view: CX is innovation, and an organization with funded innovation efforts but no funded CX effort is operating with a 1990s model.
For CEOs who want to support their CX leaders, the handbook recommends moving CX into the boardroom, asking the CFO to offer more support and less scrutiny early on, bringing HR in to build skills and capabilities, redesigning CX governance so reporting matches activity, establishing a measurement and bonusing regime around CX, and issuing a CX charter that signals total CEO support.
The handbook's reset framework gives a CXO a sequence for rebuilding a stalled CX function. It rests on one framing choice: call the effort a reset, because the label change will work against you.
Start by deconstructing the CEO's goals for your position and breaking them into individual paths for the first 100, 200, and 300 days. Hold reset meetings with peers before anyone else, beginning with the CFO and the leaders of sales and business development, marketing, and product, service, and innovation. Bring HR in early, define a project that quickly demonstrates the value of CX, and roadmap the integration of VoC data with action. Then work through the foundational reset questions:
The first 100 days are about alignment. The handbook sequences it by month:
The handbook also supplies a seven-part alignment script for these conversations, from announcing the reset and requesting help to setting a transparent drumbeat of internal communication.
The CX leader makes the case for owning three tightly wound elements: the cultural axis shift toward customer experience, the customer experience itself, and the product and service interfaces. The people met during the first 100 days form a CX Supergroup that lays out the vision for the reset. Three activities join the elements and unlock positive attitudes around CX: employee engagement, CX innovation, and content marketing.
The handbook reorganizes CX functions into four human-centered areas instead of organization-centric ones:
Feel: Internal and external brand experience, design interface, digital and offline CX delivery, and employee engagement in support of CX
Voice: Social listening, VoC, contact center, editorial planning, and distribution channels
Activation: Content, search, loyalty and retention, and interactions with real people
Measurement: Strategy and metrics for internal and external performance, CRM data, and analytics environments
Whether the reset runs through centralized control or decentralized enablement depends on CX maturity. A firm new to CX benefits from a more centralized reset that establishes the right interfaces, while a mature organization with existing buy-in can decentralize.
Create two sets of measures: a comprehensive set that the Supergroup uses to determine real progress, and a high-level set shared with the entire company. Company-wide measures include percentage increases in Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Aggregate Revenue from CX (ARCX), positive customer experience and satisfaction, and brand strength, along with percentage decreases in customer effort and regular NPS, CSAT, or CES reporting by critical-to-quality aspects of the experience. Agree with the CEO in advance on exactly how performance will be judged at six and 12 months, and use a VoC platform as the single source of truth. The strategic objective is to shift CX from a cost center to a value center.
The handbook is written for Chief Experience Officers, Chief Customer Officers, CMOs, COOs, and CX directors at mid-market and enterprise organizations, including professional services firms in insurance, legal, accounting, and architecture, engineering, and construction. It serves leaders building a CX program and leaders restructuring one that has stalled.
A Chief Experience Officer is the executive accountable for the end-to-end customer experience across every channel and stage of the journey. The role combines experience strategy, governance, measurement, and funding under one mandate.
The titles are often used interchangeably. A CXO usually emphasizes experience design across the full journey, while a Chief Customer Officer usually emphasizes customer relationships, retention, and revenue.
Gartner reported that more than 90% of organizations had a CXO, Chief Customer Officer, or equivalent title by 2020, after more than 35% lacked the role in 2017. The role continues to grow.
The handbook identifies three patterns. Outperforming enterprises have a shorter distance between the boardroom and the customer on CX funding and initiatives, share a collective ambition around the customer imperative, and can pause, reset the CX function, and set a renewed course.
A CX reset is a deliberate pause to regroup and set a renewed course, with fresh strategies that empower CX leaders and employees. The handbook structures it in five steps: reset the CX agenda, reset the 100-day plan, focus on the CX nucleus, reset the CX ecosystem, and reset the performance measures.
The handbook organizes the work around paths for the first 100, 200, and 300 days, with the first 100 days devoted to alignment. Month 1 covers the CEO and the heads of marketing, sales, and operations, Month 2 covers HR, finance, IT, and innovation, and Month 3 covers customer-facing sales work, segmentation, and a CX Center of Excellence.
The handbook recommends two measurement sets. The company-wide set emphasizes Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Aggregate Revenue from CX (ARCX), alongside customer effort and NPS, CSAT, or CES scores by critical-to-quality aspects of the experience.
CXOs, Chief Customer Officers, CMOs, COOs, and CX directors who are building a new CX program or restructuring an existing one.
The handbook is based on 67 interviews with CX leaders, chief executives, and front-line employees, 34 of them in professional services. It was produced by CX Pilots, a customer experience consultancy serving mid-market and enterprise professional services firms.
