The Chief Experience Officer: Growth architect of the modern enterprise

The Chief Experience Officer

Experience is the new battleground for growth, and the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) is the strategist who unites product, marketing, operations, and technology to win it.

The Chief Experience Officer (CXO) helps a business compete on experience, which in many industries has already become the most powerful differentiator. They do this by turning customer insights into strategies, building cross-functional alignment to drive better execution and deliver measurable financial outcomes. And doing that successfully makes customer experience the growth engine of your business. 

When I led customer experience for Hertz, the global car rental company, we had two critical insights:

1) Our fleet did not match our competitors in terms of quality or features;

2) Customers preferred having a choice in vehicles.

I co-led an effort to convert our rental operations from the old assignment-based system to a choice-based product where renters could choose a vehicle from designated sections in the lot. Once we executed on this at our top 50 US airports, revenue grew more than $450M in successive years after three years of declining revenue. Customers appreciated the ability to choose their own vehicle and get the drive, comfort, and features they wanted.

Driving revenue increases based on customers’ preferring the experience you provide is one key way that the CXO can drive growth. Customers having better experiences also stay longer, churn less and share their positive experiences with others to help increase your customer base and reduce your customer acquisition cost (CAC). It is well documented that closing the leaky bucket (reducing churn) is one of the best growth levers a company has, particularly in uncertain economic times.

Defining the CXO role: Growth officer and business integrator 

The Chief Experience Officer is responsible for the end-to-end customer journey, from the time a customer learns about your product or service to the time of renewal and upgrade, ensuring that every interaction (communications, digital and physical) creates value for both the customer and the business. This isn’t about “making customers happy.” It’s about turning experience into a strategic lever for growth, retention, and profitability.

The modern CXO is part strategist, part innovator, part operator, and accountable for:

• Aligning business units around a customer strategy and specific customer journeys.
• Translating customer insights into action across product, marketing, sales, and operations.
• Driving adoption and retention to boost Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and LTV.
• Championing digital transformation and technology innovation guided by customer needs, not internal efficiency.
• Quantifying the ROI of experience investments — linking CX improvements to revenue and customer growth, market share gains, cost reduction, and increased profitability.

A CXO cannot live in a silo. To be effective, they must sit at the executive leadership table, reporting directly to the CEO, with visibility to the board. In addition to being the Chief Growth Officer, the CXO is effectively the Chief Integration Officer, as customer experience should be the connective tissue between product, marketing, sales, operations, HR and IT. 

Returning to my Hertz example to highlight how the CXO works with every other C-Suite leader and function in the company. First, we worked with the CFO to build and justify the business case for this transformation effort. We collaborated with the CIO and technology teams to rewrite the reservation and inventory management systems. We also had to join forces with the brand and marketing team to redesign the lots and customer signage for wayfinding. We worked with the CRM team to rewrite all customer communications related to a rental transaction. We teamed up with the COO and Operations on new operating models and processes and Pricing to rethink and reconfigure pricing models across car classes and upgrade opportunities. We worked with the CHRO and HR teams to redesign job functions and ensure we had the right employees in place. And finally, together with HR, Operations, Customer Care and the outsourced partners, we retrained the entire customer-facing employee population and on-lot operations teams. 

This enterprise-wide example crossed all executive leaders and their functions given its breadth, but even managing customer journeys on a smaller scale will entail the CXO working with one or more of their executive peers on any given assignment or transformation. The CXO is the connective tissue of the organisation, ensuring what’s promised by the brand is delivered by the product and/or service and people, supported by the right technology, reinforced by the culture, and reflected in the numbers.

How to properly support the CXO of the future

Once we understand and embrace the importance of having a CXO, what do we need to do to unlock the full potential of the CXO role?

It starts with defining the role more broadly than has typically been done. In many companies, the VP of CX is really not leading the complete customer experience. Instead, they own the Voice of the Customer (VoC) program and an analytics function, and perhaps the customer care organisation, though often this sits elsewhere. A strong leader will be able to derive insights and influence the organisation to change. As many CX leadership job descriptions in B2B companies suggest, CX leaders own the professional services functions - things like the implementation, onboarding and customer success functions. While these are important elements of the customer experience, they do not represent the full strategic opportunity to be a growth driver for the business as the CX leader will struggle to influence go-to-market motions and product roadmaps. 

As I’ve argued, a true CXO first of all owns the entire customer journey strategy. This means defining how the company goes to market and what experience it wants to deliver for each customer segment across each channel. The CXO may own some or all of the functions that directly impact a customer, but they also need to have CEO and board support to impact product, marketing, sales, IT, and HR at a minimum. 

Given the wide-ranging impact of this position, we must evaluate who is being hired as the CXO and the necessary skill sets: executive presence, ability to influence, interdisciplinary knowledge, relationship builder, and communication skills. The successful person is able to articulate a vision, a strategy for achieving it, and then influence the organisation to make that vision come to life across digital and physical experiences and human and AI interactions.  

Because the CXO really works cross-functionally, we must create shared accountability across the organization with financial and experience-based metrics such as churn, customer growth, GRR and NRR. If customer experience is the growth driver and basis for your competitive positioning, minimise the focus on satisfaction metrics like NPS or CSAT and focus instead on growth and retention-based metrics. You may even wish to consider changing the traditional silo-based org chart to be more matrixed across customer journeys.

Finally, no organisation, let alone a CXO, can be successful without rethinking data structure and accessibility and the organisation's capabilities in predictive analytics and AI. 

Conclusion: The CXO as growth architect

In an era where customers can switch brands with a click, experience is no longer a cost centre; it’s the business operating model. The CXO ensures that your brand promise matches reality, your products solve real customer problems, and your operations deliver frictionless journeys. For CEOs and boards, supporting the CXO isn’t just about listening to the voice of the customer. It’s about aligning the organisation for sustainable growth, operational excellence, and competitive advantage.

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Eric Smuda is an award-winning customer-obsessed, data-driven leader with global success leading large-scale CX transformations with particular expertise in the financial services, technology, travel and SaaS industries. With a career spanning leadership roles at Likewize, Hertz and Avis Budget, and consulting with numerous Fortune 500 companies, Eric is a recognized authority in customer experience strategy, voice of customer, and experience delivery. He holds an MBA in Marketing from Southern Methodist University and is known for his ability to drive growth through better customer experience and retention. Eric frequently speaks at industry events and is a passionate advocate for CX as a growth engine.