Why every company needs a CXO

There is a growing gap inside many organizations – one that is rarely discussed explicitly but increasingly felt. On one side, companies are becoming more ambitious. They invest in new strategies, new offerings, and new ways of positioning themselves in the market. The intent is clear: to stay relevant, to differentiate, to grow.

On the other side, the experience of those ambitions – how they are actually delivered – often struggles to keep up. Not because people are not capable. Not because the strategy is wrong. But because no one is truly responsible for how it all comes together. In a business landscape where experience is becoming the primary driver of perception, trust, and value, that absence of ownership is no longer sustainable.

Research from McKinsey shows that companies that excel at customer experience and personalization generate up to 40% more revenue from those activities than average players. This is not a soft discipline. It is a business-critical capability.

The way customers engage with companies today is fundamentally different from even a few years ago. They no longer move through clearly defined journeys or channels. Instead, they navigate fluidly across touchpoints – from digital interfaces to human interactions, from product usage to service moments – often without noticing the transitions. At least, that is the aspiration. Because from a customer perspective, it should feel like one continuous experience.

In reality, most organizations are still on the journey toward that. What customers experience as one flow is, internally, the result of multiple teams, systems, and decisions interacting – sometimes in alignment, often not. And that gap is felt immediately. Not in strategy presentations or performance dashboards, but in the brand's lived experience. This is where strategy is either realized, or quietly falls apart.

For a long time, customer experience has been closely associated with marketing, which made sense when experience was primarily expressed through communication and brand touchpoints. But that is no longer the case.

Today, experience extends far beyond what is said. It is shaped by how products behave, how systems integrate, how services are delivered, and how decisions are made across the organization. It lives in technology, in operations, and in culture.

As a result, experience can no longer sit within a single function. Not because those functions are insufficient, but because experience itself is inherently cross-functional. It is created in the connections between systems, teams, and touchpoints. And in a world increasingly defined by AI-driven interactions and co-created solutions, those connections only become more critical. Which is exactly why they need ownership – not of the individual parts, but of how they come together.

It is tempting to describe this as an ownership issue. But in reality, it is a governance and decision-making problem. Most organizations are not set up to make the decisions required to create a coherent experience across functions. Decisions are made locally. Optimized for individual KPIs. Driven by functional priorities. Which means that even when the ambition is aligned, the execution is not.

This is where experience breaks – not in strategy, but in translation. From intent to interaction. From ambition to behavior.

The emergence of the Chief Experience Officer is a response to this structural gap. Not as a trend, but as a necessity. I recently discussed this with our own CXO at Manyone, Rasmus Møller Sørensen, who captures it well:

“Most organizations don’t struggle with defining the experience they want to deliver. They struggle with making it coherent across systems, touchpoints, and teams. That’s where the CXO role becomes critical – not to own a part of the business, but to connect it.”

Rasmus points out that connecting is only part of the role. A CXO must hold a clear and measurable mandate, otherwise the role risks becoming another layer of vision without real impact. In his words, the responsibility is not just to define experience, but to make it executable. To establish principles that guide decisions, make trade-offs explicit, align priorities across functions, and ensure that experience is directly tied to business outcomes.

This is what separates companies that talk about experience from those that actually deliver it. And it is already visible in organizations that are ahead. Companies like Airbnb have built their business around a coherent experience across product, service, and brand. Salesforce has embedded experience into how its platform, ecosystem, and customer success functions operate together. Others, like Mercedes-Benz and L’Oréal, are investing in experience leadership to ensure consistency across increasingly complex ecosystems.

What they have in common is not structure, but intent. Experience is not left to emerge. It is actively shaped.

Given the importance of experience, it is worth pausing on a simple question: Why has ownership of it not found a clear place in the C-suite? Part of the answer lies in how responsibility has historically been understood. In many organizations - and often at the board level - experience is implicitly assumed to sit with the CMO. The logic is familiar: marketing owns the brand, the communication, and the customer-facing narrative.

And for a long time, that was sufficient. But today, that assumption no longer holds. Not because marketing is less important – but because the nature of experience has fundamentally changed. It now cuts across decisions that sit far beyond the CMO’s mandate: product logic, platform behavior, service design, and operational delivery. Which means that even with strong marketing leadership, the experience itself is shaped elsewhere.

And that creates a structural blind spot. Because while ownership is assumed, it is not actually defined. This becomes visible when looking across the broader C-suite. Roles like CEO, CFO, and CTO operate with clear mandates and decision rights. Experience, however, rarely holds the same position. Which is striking, not least because of its direct impact on growth.

Experience is no longer a supporting discipline. It shapes how effectively strategy translates into customer value, how consistently the organization delivers, and ultimately how the business performs in the market. In that sense, it is not just a brand or operational concern; it is a core driver of the company’s growth potential. And yet, it remains without clear ownership.

CX is a boardroom priority – yet only a minority of large enterprises have a dedicated CXO or equivalent, and even fewer with real cross-functional authority. Instead, responsibility remains distributed. Marketing shapes the narrative. Technology enables the platforms. Sales manages the relationship. Operations deliver the service. Each function plays its part. But no one is accountable for how it all comes together. And that is the real issue. Not that experience is ignored – but that it is assumed to be owned, while in reality, it is not.

In a previous article, I wrote about why every organization needs a Go-To-Organization (GTO) strategy when bringing new products or services to market – not just to launch externally, but to ensure the organization is ready to deliver on that promise internally. Because that is where many strategies fail. Seen through the lens of the CXO, the connection becomes clear. If the CXO is responsible for how the company is experienced, then part of that responsibility must also be ensuring that the organization can actually deliver that experience; that the internal reality matches the external promise.

In that sense, the GTO agenda is not separate from the CXO role. It is a natural extension of it. Because experience is not only what you design. It is what the organization can consistently deliver.

The reality is that many organizations are not yet structured to support a CXO. Creating a role that cuts across marketing, technology, product, and operations requires more than hiring. It requires mandate, maturity, and a shift in how decisions are made.

So what happens in the meantime? In many cases, responsibility remains fragmented – or is assumed to align on its own. It rarely does. This is where an external perspective becomes critical. At Manyone, we often step into this space as a connector and integrator – bringing together strategy, design, brand, and technology to create coherence across disciplines.

Not as a replacement for ownership, but as a way to establish it. Because before experience can be owned internally, it needs to be understood, structured, and made executable. And that requires more than alignment meetings. It requires deliberate integration and strategy led by execution.

Customers do not see your organization. They experience your brand through moments. And those moments either connect, or they don’t. The companies that succeed will not be the ones with the most ambition. But the ones that can turn that ambition into coherent, consistent experiences. Because experience is not something that happens on top of the business. It is how the business is felt. And that is too important to leave without a clear owner.