Experience leaders have an exciting role in shaping customer and employee experiences, especially with the rise of generative AI and a quickly growing younger workforce and customer base. Here, we share new data about their unique challenges and offer strategies to help experience leaders optimize their impact and reach their full potential.
Chief experience officers who drive customer or employee experience (and occasionally both) have one of the most exciting, if challenging, roles in today's business world. In the first ever comprehensive quantitative study of the chief experience officer and senior experience leader—a relatively new role for many organizations—across both customer and workforce domains. We set out to understand who they are, their priorities and challenges, and how their roles evolve.
We surveyed 250 US-based experience leaders with representation across geographic locations and industries, supplementing the quantitative insights with individual interviews. Responses reveal that although the importance of customer and employee experience is growing, many experience leaders are asking for more influence and support when deploying initiatives across their organizations.
So, what keeps chief experience officers up at night?
Challenge 1
Collaborating with other leaders on experience priorities
While 87% of experience leaders are satisfied with the level of support and buy-in from the C-suite, they cite collaborating with others to drive strategic initiatives as their top challenge. Other leaders may be unsure how to involve this nascent role in their decision-making processes.
Challenge 2
Identifying actionable and well-timed experience metrics
How can something as subjective as experience be measured? And how should leaders think about approaching improvements for their customers and workers? While measures like satisfaction, retention, and engagement are a good start, they won’t go far enough.
Challenge 3
Recruiting “experienced” experience talent
Great talent is out there, though it’s not always easy to find. Candidates may lack some critical skills, including insight gathering, human-centered design, experience measurement, and strategic technology orchestration. This talent shortage makes the leader’s role that much more difficult without a robust team behind them.
Challenge 4
How to create experiences with AI while honoring concerns about humanity and trust
Of all technologies, 81% of experience leaders believe that AI (generative AI, machine learning, responsible AI, and others) will tremendously influence customer and employee experience in the coming years, but 26% say AI’s integration is a low priority. Perhaps that’s because while AI inspires curiosity and excitement, it also raises concerns about privacy, misinformation, bias, and intellectual property infringement, among other challenges.
Challenge 5
Making the investment case for customer experience and employee experience
Experience leaders are repeatedly asked to make the connection between their programs and business outcomes, yet existing measures are limiting and unproven. Experience outcomes help companies master operational connections, but often, these results are not enough to convincingly show impact and value to the rest of the enterprise.
Explore potential strategies and solutions
Striking the right balance of collaboration, metrics, talent, and technology for experience leaders is hard to implement in a way that draws leadership peers and the workforce eagerly into the program. We’re helping to address these challenges by defining a set of solutions for leaders to consider as they prioritize experience in their organizations.
How are you positioning yourself on the forefront of a quickly evolving landscape, shifting from growing the experience office to scaling for impact?
DOWNLOAD THE RESEARCH
The Challenges of the Chief Experience Officer
As Chief Experience Officer at Deloitte Digital, Amelia Dunlop helps companies develop winning strategies that combine innovation, creativity, and digital strategy. She was recognized as one of the Top 50 Women Leaders of Massachusetts for 2023 by Women We Admire! and received Consulting Magazine’s 2020 Top Women in Technology Award for Excellence in Innovation. Amelia leads a team of problem solvers who use human-centered design and customer insights strategy to help businesses shift their focus from the customer experience to the human experience. As marketers, she says we have an opportunity to create more human experiences—earning long-term loyalty and trust in the process. Author of Elevating the Human Experience and co-author of The Four Factors of Trust, both national bestsellers, Amelia writes and speaks regularly about human experience, trust, creativity, and customer strategy.
