Our latest survey sheds light on the evolving role of the chief experience officer (CXO). Learn how today’s CXOs are navigating new challenges to drive meaningful, human-centered change—and the bottom line.
Exploring CXO challenges and priorities
CXOs face the challenge of championing human experiences amid constant pressure for cost savings and quantifiable data. As their role evolves alongside customer and employee experiences, CXOs need to look ahead. They need to stay informed on trends and technology while navigating the corporate world, where nothing moves beyond a pilot without a business case.
Fortunately, we are now in an era characterized by:
Last year, we conducted our first comprehensive CXO survey and published the report "A Brave New Role: Foundational Quantitative Research on the Challenges of the Chief Experience Officer," where we identified the top five challenges of the CXO. The survey included 250 US-based leaders from various industries, and it revealed that despite the increasing emphasis on customer and employee experience—where over 90% of companies reported having a CXO or equivalent in 2020 (Gartner, Feb 2020)—leaders still faced challenges influencing experience initiatives within their organizations.
That research prompted us to dig deeper, so we embarked upon a longitudinal research project, conducting a refreshed survey this year. Like last year, we interviewed 250 US-based customer experience or workforce experience leaders working in a wide range of industries. They told us what they are prioritizing, what challenges they face, and what they are gearing up for as we race toward a new future of experience, thanks to quickly emerging technologies.
We are excited to reveal how this year’s CXO cohort compares to last year’s in terms of the 2023 key theme: CXOs’ biggest challenges.
CXOs’ biggest challenges: Changes over time
CXOs ranked their top challenges similarly to last year, with a few new priorities emerging and some challenges falling off the radar.
As the rankings illustrate, a couple of challenges rose to the top, and others dropped out of the Top 5.
The most notable shifts:
The demographics of our 2023 and 2024 cohorts, including tenure and industry spread, are similar, yet the challenges rankings have changed significantly. This suggests that the changes were largely driven by market forces and perhaps reflect broader wins in the experience realm.
As organizations tighten budgets, it is not surprising that securing funding has become a top challenge. However, the improved ease of collaboration with other leaders on experience priorities suggests a shift in openness to incorporating the ideals of human experience across broader business objectives for organizations—quite the win for CXOs. This rapid shift made us eager to continue digging and discover what else our 2024 cohort could reveal.
We found that while CXOs may be facing some universal challenges given the newness of the role (despite the slight YoY shifts), there is still flexibility in their approach to dealing with those challenges. We think it is the perfect time to take full advantage of the openness they are seeing from other leaders to address those challenges and elevate experience in more holistic, human-centered ways.
Our research has identified four priorities that CXOs should focus on to better respond to changing customer and employee sentiment and prepare for the continuing evolution of the CXO role. With this knowledge, CXOs can better navigate the intricacies of their roles, ensuring they drive meaningful change throughout the organization and consistently champion customers and employees.
Top 4 priorities identified for CXOs
Priority 1: Establish and continually show the value of experience
Why are we still making the case for experience?
Despite the clear benefits—like a 50% revenue increase from improved employee experience (Harvard Business Review, 2022)—CXOs still spend nearly 40% of their time making the case for experience.
How CXOs spend their time:
The composite score for “making the case” is built on the top two: “establishing the experience strategy” (20% of time spent) and “identifying and tracking the right metrics” (18% of time spent.)
CXOs’ second most cited time spend is identifying and tracking the right metrics, and that makes sense. Throughout our research this year and last, we found that measurement is a core element of the role, especially considering how many of our 2023 and 2024 cohorts are first-in-role (50% and 51%, respectively) and how recent broader corporate buy-in to the value of experience is. It is also likely that so many are making the case because it is still early in the game. Based on our data and CXO priorities, it’s clear that as a chief champion of experience, proving its value will continue to be fundamental to success in the role.
The crux of the CXO role is the ability to confidently articulate the business value of experience while also pushing organizations to adopt an experience-led approach. It takes time to identify the right metrics to quantify that value.
Priority 2: Consider the value of collaboration from the start
Among the 2024 cohort, less tenured CXOs prioritize measurement, while those with more experience prioritize collaboration across the business. This could suggest that, initially, experience leaders concentrate on proving ROI, but as they gain tenure, fostering collaboration becomes key to achieving their objectives.
As CXOs move into years 5 and up of their tenure, we see them mark ROI measurement as a lower priority, even though it likely remains a vital element of their role. This makes sense given that an experience organization (like any organization) must establish its baselines and set up continuous tracking and measurement mechanisms to continue forward over time.
The importance CXOs place on collaboration makes sense: 86% of executives cite ineffective collaboration as a contributor to business failures. As champions of human behavior, CXOs understand how critical cross-functional collaboration is to achieving success in the experience domain.
It could be that even as starting collaborations with other leaders becomes less challenging, the next stage—transforming idea coordination to strategic execution—remains challenging. Building relationships and showcasing the benefits of experience is a significant step, and our 2024 cohort indicated that it’s becoming simpler (see the 2024 top CXO challenges above), but integrating experience as a driving force within each leader’s area is where the real work begins. Then comes the hardest part: execution, transformation, and change management.
Even for less tenured CXOs, considering the implications of execution early on is beneficial. Forming relationships is just the beginning; the true challenge lies in strategic execution and driving meaningful change.
Priority 3: Align experience strategy to key factors that drive trust
Experience leaders rank building trust as their top priority for 2024. However, they often overlook the key drivers of trust that truly influence customer and employee behavior.
Less than 20% of workforce experience (WX) and customer experience (CX) leaders feel they excel at building trust by demonstrating empathy and kindness, treating everyone fairly, and openly sharing information, motives, and choices in plain language, despite those being the top trust drivers for customers and employees.
While trust has been declining for years (American Confidence in Institutions, TrustID), it is a cornerstone of experience. We know that trust drives not only human behavior but also market value.
From Deloitte’s TrustID research, we know that there are four factors that increase trust and that what drives trust for employees and customers is slightly different. However, among the CXOs we surveyed this year, we found that neither workforce nor customer experience leaders are prioritizing the biggest drivers of trust for their respective cohorts.
Biggest drivers of customer trust:
Demonstrating humanity and transparency drive up trust among customers by 195% and 177%, respectively. However, according to our 2024 CXO research, just 12% of CX leaders believe their organization needs to improve its approach to humanity to build trust with customers and employees.
Biggest drivers of employee trust:
Demonstrating transparency and capability drive up trust among employees by 171% and 163%, respectively.
Despite this, we found that just 13% of WX leaders think their organization is strong in openly sharing information, motives, and choices with their audience in straightforward, plain language.
While the data varies slightly, both CX and WX leaders are missing what their audiences value most. To regain an edge, business leaders must restore trust at the core of their strategies, and experience leaders can and should lead that charge.
Building trust centers on knowing an audience and understanding not only what audiences want from a reliability or capability standpoint but also what they value when it comes to humanity and transparency, which is important. When it comes to increasing trust among employees, open communication and transparency around policies and change are incredibly important. We found that as companies increase in size, trust drops. Further, capability is impacted by factors that may seem unexpected. For instance, companies that allow 21%-40% remote work have the highest capability scores, showing that flexibility and a balanced approach inspire trust.
Experience leaders must prioritize what employees and customers value most. While capability and reliability are essential, transparency and humanity are becoming non-negotiables, especially for younger generations who prioritize them even higher.
Spotlight
Among Gen Z and millennial customers, transparency and humanity are slowly becoming interwoven into perceptions of a brand’s competence—and that is influencing purchase habits.
When Gen Z and millennial customers believe that a consumer product’s brand is high in humanity and transparency …
Priority 4: Be (or become best friends with) the organization’s experience futurist
Experience leaders balance multiple responsibilities: proving the value of experiences, gaining organizational buy-in, and pushing technological boundaries with a forward-looking vision. They build strong foundations while constantly anticipating future trends, and that requires a futurist vision. We explored CXOs’ views on AI and emerging technology to understand their future impact on experiences.
As technology evolves rapidly, CXOs must steer its development with a human-centered focus. Our data revealed that three of the five emerging technologies CXOs anticipate will have the most significant impact in the next year echo a familiar sentiment: AI is just the beginning.
Here are the other top emerging technologies that experience leaders are closely monitoring, why they matter, and what they signify for the future of experience:
Edge computing, blockchain, and neuromorphic computing would transform the future of digital experiences by enabling real-time, secure, and personalized interactions that are energy-efficient and user-empowered, paving the way for a more inclusive and sustainable digital ecosystem.
Edge computing
Edge computing processes data near its source, enhancing system performance and security by reducing latency, minimizing bandwidth usage, and limiting data exposure. This enables real-time decision-making and responsiveness without relying on a central data center, which is crucial for time-sensitive applications and digital interactions.
As we move toward a future increasingly reliant on digital experiences, edge computing will play a pivotal role in shaping our daily interactions. Reducing latency and increasing efficiency can make digital experiences feel more immediate and realistic, significantly improving how we interact with technology on a day-to-day basis.
Employee Experience: A video conferencing system that uses edge computing can provide higher quality video and audio with minimal lag, improving the overall collaboration experience for employees.
Blockchain
Blockchain is a decentralized digital ledger technology (a system where information is stored across many different computers instead of one central place), ensuring transparency and security. It enhances customer and employee experiences by providing a secure and transparent way to handle transactions, contracts, and records, building trust as every change is recorded and verifiable. Decentralization empowers individual users and increases access, lowering barriers to ideation, testing, and launching new products and services.
As blockchain technology evolves, it will likely lead to more decentralized and user-empowered business models, enhancing transparency and security. This shift will lower barriers to innovation, allowing for the creation and delivery of highly personalized, secure services. Ultimately, blockchain could redefine trust and user engagement in digital interactions, setting new standards for how services are experienced across various sectors. In all? It could mean an innovation boom.
Customer Experience: A financial services company could use blockchain to allow customers to manage their personal information securely, reducing the risk of data breaches and identity theft.
Neuromorphic computing
Neuromorphic computing mimics the human brain to achieve massive parallel processing, exceptional energy efficiency, and adaptive learning. Unlike traditional AI, which relies on cloud processing and can introduce latency, neuromorphic computing uses spiking neural networks (SSNs) for real-time, on-device analytics and decision-making, significantly reducing energy consumption. This technology can enhance personalized customer interactions and adaptive employee environments.
As it integrates into business operations, neuromorphic computing will drive a transformative shift toward more sustainable and efficient digital experiences. This shift will enable businesses to deliver enhanced, personalized services cost-effectively while aligning with environmental goals. By providing instant, contextually relevant insights, this shift will also pave the way for innovative applications in various sectors, from health care to finance.
Customer Experience: A company can use neuromorphic computing to quickly respond to negative feedback or capitalize on positive trends, thereby improving overall customer satisfaction.
CXOs and their teams act as gatekeepers to technological advancements, asking critical questions to ensure human-centered transformations. These technologies all leverage personalized, real-time data processing and decision-making, which means they can help create top-notch experiences for customers and workers. The emerging technologies CXOs picked as most impactful have in common the potential to impact experience positively, deepening connections and improving trust. Staying on top of AI and other emerging technologies is crucial for CXOs to serve their organizations effectively.
The CXO’s strategic path forward
The role of the CXO is at a pivotal juncture, balancing foundational tasks like building trust and proving the value of experience with forward-looking responsibilities like integrating emerging technologies and fostering collaboration. This year's survey highlights a significant shift toward greater openness and collaboration across organizations.
By aligning experience strategies with the key drivers of trust, continually demonstrating the business value of experience, prioritizing collaboration from the outset, and staying ahead of technological advancements, CXOs are uniquely positioned to elevate the human experience.
About the authors
Amelia Dunlop serves as the chief experience officer for Deloitte Digital.
Francesca Dijols serves as the Customer Growth Strategy leader for Deloitte Consulting.
Duke Schaeffer is a leader in our Customer Strategy & Design practice, and he also serves as the program lead for Deloitte’s Human (Workforce and Customer) Experience platform.
Mariel Soto Reyes is an experienced researcher, writer, and experience strategist at Deloitte Digital, specializing in innovation, human-centered design, and strategy.
Brittany Arboleda, Helena Augenstein, Saie Ganoo, Jack Gerber, Bri Leon, Megan Stansbury, Kara Jacqueline Smith, and Ryan Youra also contributed to this research.
