The CXO Your Board Actually Needs
Plenty of CX leaders can describe the problem. The ones who matter can change the decision.
Most CEOs don’t need another executive reminding them that customers matter.
What they’re missing is someone who notices when customer behavior starts contradicting the assumptions the strategy is built on, can say what that costs, and can help the company do something about it.
That should be the Chief Experience Officer’s job.
The real question was never whether the role exists. It’s whether the person in it can actually change a decision.
Plenty can’t.
Some companies get along fine without a CXO. Others hand out the title and then keep the person miles away from anything that matters.
And I’ve met CXOs who can describe customer pain in exhaustive detail but go quiet the moment you ask what the company should stop doing, or which risk it should just live with. That’s not a knock on the role. It’s the bar the good ones clear.
The Customer Gets the Whole Company
Companies are built to split work apart.
Customers get the thing after it’s been glued back together. Inside, a problem lives across three budgets and four owners.
Outside, it shows up as one experience, under one logo.
Somebody has to see what all those separate decisions turn into by the time they reach a customer. That’s the CXO. Not the person who cares the most, but the one who can show the company the customer and commercial consequences of its choices at the same time. It’s a job about the whole business. That’s why it belongs near the top of it.
Reading the Road Isn’t Enough
I keep coming back to rally racing. I don’t know much about rally racing, but I do know that the driver handles the car and the co-driver reads pace notes for the road ahead: where the next corner tightens, what’s over the crest. And the co-driver isn’t there to say “slow down.” The point is the opposite: knowing what’s coming lets the driver push harder.
That’s the partnership a CEO should want.
But the metaphor only takes you so far. A CXO who spends the whole race calling out hazards from the passenger seat hasn’t done the job. They also have to help change the conditions creating the hazards in the first place. Spot a recurring problem but fail to get the organization to move on it, and all you’ve bought is a better view of the wreck.
This is where CX leaders get made, or found out.
Bringing the “voice of the customer” into the room has value. But showing people evidence of pain is not the same as giving them advice. The ones who earn the seat tend to do three things the others don’t.
They talk in tradeoffs, not complaints. Sometimes the right call is to accept a worse experience. Not every complaint deserves a company-wide response, and some friction isn’t worth the money to remove. A credible CXO knows where being excellent actually wins you something, where good-enough is fine, and where you’re spending real money polishing something no customer will ever notice.
They’re in the decision before the budget is. The advice has to land while the choice is still soft, before priorities are locked, and everyone’s just looking for validation.
They follow the cost, not just the benefit.
When the Metric Stops Counting
That third one is the part almost everyone misses.
A decision’s benefit gets measured right where the decision was made. The cost often shows up somewhere else, months later, long after someone already declared victory. The metric wasn’t lying. It just counted the win where it happened and never went looking for the bill.
Take Starbucks. In April 2024, the company said a mid-teens percentage of mobile orders were being abandoned before purchase. People gave up over long waits and out-of-stock items.
The slide was already happening: North American comparable sales down 3 percent, transactions down 7. Those abandoned orders weren’t an early-warning light blinking off to the side of the numbers. They were the numbers. Customers were walking up to the digital front door and turning around.
Management said it had a handle on it.
By Q4, U.S. comparable-store sales were down 6 percent on a 10 percent drop in transactions, and EPS fell 25 percent. CX wasn’t the whole story. Starbucks also pointed to competition and a soft China. But the company’s own account connected the experience to the behavior: incoming CEO Brian Niccol said customers had decided Starbucks was a hassle and were coming in less.
You can file an abandoned order as a conversion problem. Or you can read it as a sign the operation can’t deliver the convenience it keeps promising.
Which one it is decides who owns it, and that call belongs to the CXO, assuming anyone let them in the room.
Dow Built the Capability. American Gave It a Title.
Dow just built the wider view.
Starting in 2017, its commercial and CX people worked out a shared way to listen to customers and actually feed it into decisions, and eventually wrote the Customer Experience Index into executive pay.
That index climbed 30 percent between 2018 and 2023, complaints and resolution times dropped double digits, and digital leads went up tenfold. Crediting one program for all of that would be too tidy. But the capability was real, and it didn’t need the exact title.
A Chief Commercial Officer and a Global Director of Customer Experience ran it.
American Airlines is the other version: same capability, but with a title and one name on the hook.
In early 2025, American created its first real Chief Customer Officer role and gave it to Heather Garboden, a senior VP, with a CX organization built to sit across both commercial and operations. “A true convergence,” as she put it to Newsweek.
It showed up in the results. In American’s own Q2 earnings release, “elevate the customer experience” is the first of the four commercial pillars the CEO puts in front of investors.
NPS was up five points year over year, on-time NPS rose for the 15th time in 17 months, and revenue hit a record. And Garboden did the thing that actually buys a CX leader a permanent chair: she built a number her CFO can use, pegging a single NPS point at somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars, a figure she’s quick to call directional, not gospel.
That’s what the rally metaphor was missing.
Not a co-driver who reads the road, but one who changes what the car is and can tell you what it’s worth in the only language the board really trusts.
The Board Should Know Who Can Change the Decision
Customer evidence has to show up while the choices are still being made, not after the budget’s set. And honestly, the relationship should be a little uncomfortable.
An advisor who never once changes the CEO’s mind is well-liked, sure, but I’m not convinced they’re advising anyone. Evidence that’s only welcome when it agrees with the plan isn’t worth much.
So here’s the question a board should just ask outright:
Who in this company can tell when customers are contradicting the strategy and can they change a real decision about it?
There should be a name. More and more, it’s the CX leader’s. Hand someone that job without the authority to act on it, and all you’ve done is make them the person who has to explain a problem they were never allowed to fix.
Call it CXO, Chief Customer Officer, whatever you like. What matters is that the capability exists, that one person owns it, and that the CEO reaches for it before the decision instead of after.
Do that, and the CX leader stops being a nice-to-have, or a conscience you keep at a polite distance. They become the person who keeps the strategy honest against the customer.
Which is more or less the whole reason the boardroom exists.
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