What is a chief experience officer?

A chief experience officer, or CXO, is an executive who owns the end-to-end experience of a defined group across every touchpoint. The title is used two ways: for customer experience in most companies, and for employee or patient experience in others.

The title means two different things

This is the first thing to settle, because job descriptions using the same three letters describe different jobs.

The customer experience reading is the more common one. The CXO owns the customer journey across marketing, product, service, and digital, and works next to or interchangeably with a chief customer officer.

The employee experience reading is the minority usage, found in companies that deliberately merged customer and employee experience under one leader, and in healthcare, where CXO almost always means patient experience and usually covers workforce experience too.

Check the reporting line before the title. A CXO reporting to the CMO or CEO is doing customer work. A CXO reporting to the CHRO is doing employee work.

What a chief experience officer does

The common thread is the same in both readings: the CXO owns an experience system across functions they do not control, which makes influence the central skill of the job.

CXO vs the other C-suite titles

A CHRO owns the whole HR operating system: compensation, benefits, labour relations, talent acquisition, compliance, and workforce planning.

A chief people officer covers broadly the same scope under a culture-forward label. See chief people officer and chief human resources officer.

A chief customer officer typically carries a commercial number: retention, renewals, net revenue retention, the support P&L.

An employee experience CXO owns a narrower slice than a CHRO: journey moments, onboarding, internal communications, workplace and tools, and listening programs. In most structures the CXO reports to the CHRO rather than replacing them.

The compensation data supports that reading, and it is the clearest evidence available on where the role sits.

Chief experience officer salary

Source: Salary.com, as of August 2026.

Two things are worth reading off that table.

The role is not growing in pay. Salary.com’s own trend line shows the median falling from $228,405 in 2024 to $225,925 in 2025.

And it sits well below the people-leadership seats. Salary.com puts the chief people officer median at $350,100, with a 25th to 75th range of $316,900 to $380,800, as of August 2026. The roughly $100,000 gap is a useful signal that CXO is generally not a CHRO-equivalent role.

Payscale reports a CXO average base of $195,183 with a total compensation range of $93,000 to $389,000, but that estimate rests on 13 self-reported profiles, so treat it as a wide secondary range rather than a benchmark.

Skills and background

Customer experience CXOs come predominantly from marketing, digital and product, service operations, and CX consulting.

Employee experience CXOs come from HR business partnering, internal communications, organizational design, and workplace or facilities leadership.

Healthcare CXOs come from nursing leadership, quality and safety, and hospital operations.

The competency thread across all three is journey mapping, experience measurement, cross-functional influence without direct authority, and increasingly AI-enabled service design.

How to become a chief experience officer

There is no single route, but the pattern in the people holding the title is consistent enough to describe.

Most arrive with ten to fifteen years in one delivery function, marketing and product for customer experience, HR business partnering or internal communications for employee experience, then a period running a cross-functional program that gave them credibility outside their own team.

The step that separates candidates is measurement. Someone who has built a listening or voice-of-customer program, defended its methodology, and used it to change a decision has the thing the role is actually hired for.

The second is comfort operating without authority. Anyone whose track record depends on owning the team that does the work will find the job frustrating.

Where the role is heading

Honest answer: the evidence is thin and points sideways rather than up.

No primary source counts chief experience officers. Every prevalence figure in circulation traces back to vendor content, so any number claiming to know how many companies have one should be treated with suspicion.

What is verifiable is that C-suites have been expanding. Deloitte’s analysis of BoardEx data and 46,000 C-suite job postings found Fortune 500 top leadership teams grew 23% on average between 2018 and 2023, from 6.7 to 8.2 executives. That expansion is the structural reason titles like CXO exist at all, though Deloitte does not break out the experience roles specifically.

Pressure on customer experience teams is documented. Forrester’s Predictions 2026 warns that CX budgets and headcounts remain under constant threat and predicts 15% of CX teams will enter a decline driven by budget pressure and metrics obsession.

On the employee side, experience work looks to be moving back into the CHRO agenda rather than out to a separate chief. SHRM’s January 2026 research found 46% of CHROs naming leadership and manager development their top priority for the second consecutive year, with workplace culture priorities jumping from 15% in 2025 to 31% in 2026.

How to structure the role if you create one

Define which experience, in the title

“Chief customer experience officer” and “chief employee experience officer” cost two words and prevent a year of confusion.

Give it a measurement mandate

The role earns its place by owning the measurement system, not by owning the touchpoints.

Name the decision rights explicitly

Influence without authority is the job. Write down which decisions the CXO can make alone, which they can veto, and which they only advise on.

Put it where the work sits

Reporting to the CHRO for employee experience, to the CEO or CMO for customer experience. A CXO parked between the two owns neither.

Fund the measurement, not just the leader

An experience leader without a listening infrastructure produces opinions.

Reporting structure and who they work with

There is no standard reporting line, which is part of why the role is hard to compare across companies. No primary dataset covers CXO reporting structures or team sizes, so anyone quoting typical numbers is quoting a vendor blog.

What can be said is who the role has to work through. On the customer side that means product, marketing, service operations, digital, and sales. On the employee side it means HR business partners, internal communications, IT, and workplace or facilities.

Direct teams tend to be small. The delivery capacity sits in the functions, which is why the job is usually described as influence-heavy.

The measurement function is the exception. Where a CXO owns anything outright it is normally the listening and analytics capability, because that is the part no other function wants to run and the part that gives the role standing in a leadership meeting.

How Engagedly helps

An experience leader is only as good as what they can see. Engagedly’s Engage & Listen module gives the role a measurement layer across the employee lifecycle, from onboarding through exit, with results segmented by function and level so experience gaps show up where someone can act on them.

The Talent Mobility Suite covers the internal movement part of the journey, which is where employee experience and career progression meet.

Chief experience officer FAQs