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. Data from a new Deloitte report provides insights into the unique challenges experience leaders face and offers strategies to help them optimize their impact and reach their full potential.
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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, Deloitte set out to understand who they are, their priorities and challenges, and how their roles are likely to 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?
Here are the five most significant challenges faced by experience leaders:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 is hard to implement in a way that draws leadership peers and the workforce eagerly into the program. On one hand, experience leaders are being asked to move faster, while in other cases, they are feeling pressure to act boldly. Leaders must be prepared to take a bi-focal approach making progress that is both demonstrating near term results and bold enough to be transformational.
The growth of the role of the CXO indicates movement in the right direction: a world in which elevating the human experience, for both customers and employees, is a shared enterprise-wide vision.
