Chief experience officer role evolves with new technologies

The chief experience officer (CXO) role tends to be all over the place, depending on who's in charge of customer experience at a given company -- marketing? Customer service? Is a team independent of both?

Many companies still are on their first CXO, according to new research from Deloitte Digital based on a survey of 250 CX leaders across many verticals. The role appears to be evolving into a tech-heavy job, as companies increasingly rely on AI for facets of CX such as marketing personalization and automation. Yet CXOs struggle to improve CX because they're given limited influence and support.

We interviewed Deloitte Digital's CXO, Amelia Dunlop, to discuss the research and her experience.

What does the typical chief experience officer job look like now?

Dunlop: You do a Google search and there's a wide range. It's generally the most senior person who's responsible for the end-to-end customer experience. They can have ownership of a number of different pieces of that experience: Sometimes, it's anchored in the contact center. Sometimes it's anchored in the product, depending on the organization. Sometimes, they're much more closely associated with innovation and transformation of the organization.

The scope of direct responsibility -- and to whom they report -- still varies widely. Sometimes, they report to a CMO; sometimes, they are peers of the CMO. The way that I think about it is that it's the person with whom -- regardless of what they own directly -- they are responsible for influence across the organization. They report to the CEO or the board about their CX metrics. They're accountable for the end-to-end customer journey and the improvement at any pain points. They're often responsible for the technology platforms that touch our customers. They're also often responsible for a company's customer-centric of vision and broader culture mindset.

One lonely CXO told me that his job was to represent the customer in executive meetings and basically be the contrarian.

Dunlop: What's interesting is, I know that there's that analogy of leaving an empty chair at the table to represent the customer. The fact is that the work of the chief experience officer is done when somebody else is representing the voice of the customer. It's a different mindset. When somebody else makes that point, you don't have to anymore.

The research shows that the chief experience officer must drive change without much help or budget. How do they drive change and influence people?

Dunlop: In the early days of the role of chief experience officer, it's imperative to demonstrate the business value of improving CX, so there's often a push for measurement and metrics. One of the primary ways in which you influence and drive change is by showing that when we invest in better experiences for our customers, here's the positive impact on our pipeline and here's the impact on our revenue. Until you can tell that story with data in a compelling way, it's tough to influence the organization's behavior. And I think that's rational.

How does a chief experience officer use technology to shape CX to be more -- to use the report's words -- authentic, transparent and humane?

Dunlop: Whatever the industry, almost every touchpoint that a customer has with your organization is mediated through some form of technology. The role of the chief experience officer is very much emerging out of the field of human-centered design. When technology got so big, we needed the field of human factor interface to think about, how does the human interact with it?

I see in my own work that my role, in part, is making sure -- as we create more and more powerful technologies, including AI -- that we're not just doing it for its own sake. We're doing it to solve a human problem, such as "Let's remove friction from the customer's life. Let's remove friction from the employee's life. Let's make it easier to do the thing they want to do. Let's not just push complex phone trees at them or complex technology where you can't even find the button to do the thing you need the button to do." Human-centered design is an important part of that.

One of your report's findings is that CXOs must care about edge computing. Why?

Dunlop: I was surprised by that finding as well, but it makes sense to me in that, as experience officers, we're always trying to think about what's next, or what are the ways in which we can improve an experience? Is there an AI to comport this? Is there a bot that can make it easier? I am constantly being pitched by startups -- voice recognition or sentiment analysis, all these new ways of understanding human behavior. So I think that's why there's an interest from CXOs in things like edge computing -- you've got to take a point of view on whether or not this is going to make the experience better or worse for humans.

Also, it suggests CXOs bone up on blockchain and neuromorphic computing.

Dunlop: It goes back to human-centered design and technology and that relationship. A lot of technology is created because we can: We have the power, we have the data, we have the chips, we have engineers coming up with creative ideas. But just because we can do it, should we? What does the human actually want? Those two things have to go hand-in-hand. The chief experience officer cares a lot about what's desirable from the human perspective, matched with what's possible or feasible from a technology perspective.

What advice would you give to chief experience officers who are getting frustrated with the slow rate of change at their organizations -- despite all their best efforts?

Dunlop: I'm an optimist, and my advice would be to persevere. As technology becomes more and more powerful, so is the role of the executive who is deeply versed in the technology but is really thinking about how it affects the humans who are your customers. I think that there's a growing need for this field. People who can demonstrate the value of CX improvements, create business cases and report the metrics will be increasingly in demand.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.