ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Customer experience officer is still a relatively new role.
• A majority of experience officers are fresh to their position.
• Officers spend time with customers and analyzing key metrics.

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I’ve long felt that “customer experience officer” should be everyone’s role, regardless of job title. However, this C-suite position is becoming common, and perhaps necessary, if customer experience is to be measured and boosted to the highest levels possible. These days, technical knowledge of digital and AI systems, combined with an ability to deliver customer satisfaction, is a crucial combination.

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While the formal role of customer experience officer has been around for a decade or more, it’s still a relatively new job title, according to a study by Deloitte Digital released earlier this year. A majority (51%) of experience officers noted they were pioneers and the first in their organization to serve in such a position, “underscoring how new the role is.”

So what is a customer experience officer, and is this a role to which anyone can aspire?

Technical skills and people skills

For some, the role may seem amorphous, a feel-good role that is duplicative of other positions. However, there are solid advocacy, leadership, and analysis requirements wrapped up in such a position.

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The top roles identified in the Deloitte research include proving the value of customer and employee experience to the bottom line, gaining organizational buy-in, and pushing technological boundaries with a forward-looking vision.

Perhaps not surprisingly, AI — responsible AI, to be exact — tops experience officers’ priorities lists for the coming year: “As technology evolves rapidly, experience officers must steer its development with a human-centered focus. AI is just the beginning.”

It’s even likely that AI, with its ability to look deeply into customer motivations and preferences, can boost demand for such roles. Chief AI officers are also emerging within forward-looking organizations. The average annual salary for US-based chief experience officers is more than $150,000, according to estimates from ZipRecruiter.

The ideal experience officer brings both technical and people skills to the table. “It starts with conversations,” said Liz Centoni, chief customer experience officer at Cisco.

Works closely with customers 

ZDNET had the opportunity to speak with Centoni, who assumed the chief experience officer role a year ago, leading a team of 20,000 people within the organization who are directly involved with client contact. Much of Centoni’s time is spent meeting directly with customers.

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While her organization is large and includes multiple teams, the essential activities of a chief experience officer are just as applicable to small and medium-sized businesses: “You need to ask, ‘What experience do you want to change? What’s the vision? Are you looking to reduce friction in your organization?'”

The definition of customer experience officer may differ from company to company, and responsibilities may fall to other executives, even the CEO. “I happen to have the title in the company,” said Centoni. “But every single activity of my peers is absolutely important in delivering that experience to our customers, whether touching them directly or working behind the scenes.”

Working closely with customers to identify and develop use cases is key, she continued. In Cisco’s case, this activity involves making it as easy as possible to develop and deploy networks that are ready to handle AI applications. The experience officer also needs to use surveys and real-time data streams from customers to decipher their issues.

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Centoni said that looking behind the numbers at the qualitative and anecdotal observations of customers is crucial: “Sometimes the numbers may show that you’re doing really well, but there may be underlying issues.”

How to succeed and advance

To succeed as an experience officer, knowledge of technology is important. “It’s fundamental table stakes,” she said. “Someone in my role needs to come in, using AI, and completely rethink how to change how our customers experience us. It’s a big change. And you have to be able to set the vision and direction. But you have to spend a lot of time with customers.”

To advance to such a role, “you bring your product knowledge, and you bring the technology knowledge,” she explained. “You have to think more around big, audacious goals. And you continue to validate these with your customers. They’re the ones who are going to let you know if you’re going in the right direction.”

Ultimately, Centoni agreed that “everybody in the company is a customer experience person.” At the same time, her team ensures that functions, such as customer renewals, are delivered smoothly, and it represents “about a quarter of our company’s revenues. The entire goal of my team is to take our technology and products and bring them to life in our customers’ environments.”

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AI has become a valuable part of any experience officer’s toolkit, Centoni said. “With generative AI and agentic systems, we can train our models to know customers, maybe sometimes better than they know themselves. That provides us with greater personalization, along with the ability to monitor and provide predictive and proactive services. It’s helping us address issues that have been circling around for years.”

Centoni concluded: “It’s my job to make sure every customer, no matter if it’s a mom-and-pop network or a large customer with massive networks and many applications, feels like they’re our only customer.”