Dive Brief:
- More CX leaders report to the CEO than any other executive, Forrester found in a November survey of 671 CX decision-makers.
- While 20% of CX leaders report to the CEO, 15% report to chief technical officers or IT and 11% report to the chief experience or customer officer.
- “What we saw in each year of this study, and what we’re seeing qualitatively, backs up the idea that there are many places where CX can report, but it needs to be high enough in the organization to be visible to the top executives,” said Judy Weader, a principal analyst at Forrester and one of the authors of the report, in an email.
Dive Insight:
Businesses have no one answer as to who owns CX programs.
Forrester research identified 16 different departments that CX can report to. Outside the top three — CEO, IT or chief technical officer, and CXO/CCO — no single area earned more than 8% of respondents.
In part, that’s because CX’s role within an organization has grown a lot in the past two decades, said Weader.
“In the beginning, it grew up in many organizations’ marketing or market research areas, but it’s since germinated in other areas — like digital or strategy — because that’s where the passion or power core of the firm exists,” Weader said. “In some cases, it’s grown up in the CTO’s organization because it grew from an existing user experience practice.”
Notably, only 8% of respondents said their CX leader reports to marketing.
While just 1 in 5 CX leaders report directly to the CEO, half of customer success teams said they report directly to the CEO, according to a survey from ChurnZero. One thing is clear from both reports, however: CX is moving up in organization’s structure.
To Weader, that’s not surprising. “Firms that want to be customer obsessed … have been pulling CX up in the org chart to give it the visibility it needs to get resources and attention from execs,” Weader said.
