What Is a Chief Experience Officer? The C-Suite Role Everyone’s Talking About in 2025: The Ultimate Insight

What is a chief experience officer, and why does it feel like every forward-thinking company suddenly can’t live without one? If you’ve been scratching your head over this relatively new title popping up on LinkedIn profiles and in annual reports, you’re not alone. Let’s break it down in plain English—no corporate jargon overload, I promise.

What is a Chief Experience Officer, Really?

At its core, a Chief Experience Officer (CXO) is the executive who owns the entire emotional journey a person has with a brand—whether that person is a customer, an employee, or even a partner. Think of the CXO as the guardian of “how everything feels” across every touchpoint.

While a Chief Marketing Officer worries about perception and a Chief Operating Officer obsesses over efficiency, the Chief Experience Officer bridges the gap. They ask the big, sometimes uncomfortable questions: Does our app frustrate people? Do new hires feel valued from day one? When a customer complains on social media, does our response make them feel heard or just processed?

In short: the CXO is the human-centered strategist sitting at the C-suite table.

The Difference Between CXO, Chief Customer Officer, and Chief Marketing Officer

People often confuse these titles, and honestly, the lines can blur depending on the company. Here’s a quick breakdown:

• Chief Customer Officer (CCO) → Usually laser-focused on post-sale customer success, retention, and support.
• Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) → Owns brand, acquisition, messaging, and demand generation.
• Chief Experience Officer (CXO) → Oversees the holistic experience—customer AND employee—across the entire lifecycle, often including product, marketing, support, HR, and even physical spaces.

Some companies use the titles interchangeably, but the purest version of “what is a chief experience officer” includes both customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) under one roof.

Why Companies Started Hiring Chief Experience Officers Like Crazy

Go back to 2010. The iPhone was still young, Airbnb was a quirky startup, and most executives thought “customer experience” meant a slightly friendlier call-center script.

Then everything flipped.

Customers gained megaphones (hello, Twitter and review sites), employees started rating workplaces on Glassdoor, and suddenly one bad experience could tank years of marketing spend in 24 hours. Companies realized that seamless, delightful, memorable experiences weren’t a “nice-to-have”—they were the new competitive moat.

By 2025, Gartner predicts that over 75% of large enterprises will have some version of a Chief Experience Officer or equivalent role. The pandemic only accelerated this trend—when people were stuck at home ordering everything online, the brands that felt effortless and caring won big.

What Does a Chief Experience Officer Actually Do All Day?

Picture this: You’re the CXO of a major retail bank. Your week might look like:

• Monday: Reviewing heatmaps and rage-click data from the mobile app with the product team.
• Tuesday: Sitting in on new-hire onboarding to feel how confusing the first day actually is.
• Wednesday: Presenting a unified “voice of the customer + employee” dashboard to the board.
• Thursday: Mediating a turf war between marketing and customer support over who owns the post-purchase email journey.
• Friday: Testing a prototype of the new branch design—yes, some CXOs still care about physical spaces.

It’s equal parts strategist, diplomat, data nerd, and empath.

Core Responsibilities of a Chief Experience Officer

1. Experience Strategy & Vision – Crafting a North Star for how the company wants people to feel.
2. Journey Mapping Across Silos – Connecting the dots from “first Google search” to “10-year loyal advocate.”
3. Metrics That Matter – Moving the company beyond NPS to more predictive indicators like Customer Effort Score, Employee Net Promoter Score, and lifetime emotional connection.
4. Cultural Change Agent – Convincing engineers, marketers, and finance folks alike that experience drives revenue.
5. Technology & Data Leadership – Championing the tools (CDPs, journey orchestration platforms, sentiment analysis) that make personalization possible at scale.

Who Becomes a Chief Experience Officer? The Typical Background

There’s no single path, but most CXOs I’ve met share a weird mix of superpowers:

• Deep empathy (they actually enjoy talking to angry customers)
• Analytical rigor (they live for data but don’t drown in it)
• Political savvy (they can herd cats across departments)
• Storytelling chops (they translate squishy “feelings” into hard ROI for the CFO)

Common previous roles? Heads of Customer Success, VPs of Customer Experience, Chief Marketing Officers who got religion about post-sale happiness, even design agency founders who jumped ship to the client side.

Notable examples in the wild:

• Jeanne Bliss, considered the godmother of the role, helped create CXO positions at Lands’ End, Microsoft, and Allstate.
• Leah Busque moved from founding TaskRabbit to CXO at FuelX.
• Many Airbnb alumni have landed CXO gigs because, well, Airbnb basically invented modern experience design.

How the Chief Experience Officer Role is Evolving in 2025 and Beyond

The job description from five years ago already feels dated. Here’s what’s changing fast:

1. Employee Experience is No Longer Optional

Post-Great Resignation, boards finally get it: you can’t deliver great customer experiences with miserable employees. The smartest CXOs now have dotted-line responsibility for EX, culture, and even DEI initiatives.

2. AI is Both Best Friend and Biggest Threat

Generative AI can personalize at mind-blowing scale, but it can also make interactions feel robotic and soulless. The CXO is the human safeguard deciding when to deploy AI and when to keep real people in the loop.

3. Sustainability and Ethical Experience

Today’s consumers care whether your supply chain exploits people or destroys rainforests. The forward-leaning Chief Experience Officer weaves ethical, sustainable practices into the experience narrative—not as a side CSR project, but as core to the brand promise.

4. The Rise of the “Total Experience” Mandate

Gartner coined “TX” (Total Experience) to describe the intertwining of customer, employee, user, and even partner experiences. Guess who usually owns TX? That’s right—the Chief Experience Officer.

Do You Need a Chief Experience Officer? (Signs Your Company is Ready)

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do customer complaints routinely surprise the executive team?
• Are marketing and support pointing fingers at each other?
• Is your Glassdoor rating tanking while customer NPS is decent (or vice versa)?
• Are you losing top talent because “the culture just isn’t what it used to be”?

If you answered yes to two or more, it might be time to start recruiting (or at least stop rolling your eyes when someone suggests it).

How to Become a Chief Experience Officer (Even If You’re Starting from Scratch)

Dream of the title? Here’s the playbook that actually works:

1. Master journey mapping—do it for your current company, even if nobody asked.
2. Learn the language of both emotions (qualitative research) and P&L (quantitative impact).
3. Volunteer for the messy cross-functional projects nobody wants.
4. Build a personal brand around experience thinking—write, speak, post.
5. Collect small wins that tie experience improvements directly to revenue or retention.

It’s rarely a straight ladder climb. Most CXOs I know zig-zagged from marketing → operations → design → customer success before landing the big chair.

The Future: Will Every Company Eventually Have a Chief Experience Officer?

Honestly? Probably not every company—but every company that wants to survive the next decade will act like it has one, whether the title exists or not.

In smaller organizations, the founder or COO might wear the hat. In hyper-growth startups, a Head of Experience reports to the CEO. But as complexity increases, dedicating a C-level seat to “how everything feels” stops looking like a luxury and starts looking like basic hygiene.

Final Thoughts: Why What is a Chief Experience Officer Matters to YOU

Whether you’re a job seeker eyeing six-figure roles, a founder trying to scale without losing soul, or a customer wondering why some brands just “get you” while others feel like fighting with a robot—the Chief Experience Officer is quietly shaping your daily life more than you realize.

They’re the reason your favorite shopping app remembers your size, your bank texts you before you even notice a fraudulent charge, or your workplace actually feels like a place humans want to be.

So next time someone asks, “What is a Chief Experience Officer?”—you can smile and say: “They’re the person making sure companies stop treating people like transactions and start treating them like, well, people.”

Frequently Asked Questions About Chief Experience Officers

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