Timidly, a new role emerges within the company: the Chief Experience Officer or CXO, who is essential to ensure the added value of technological applications and make a brand attractive to whoever interacts with it in digital spaces.
We know that users’ demands, behaviors, and needs are in constant change. The CXO supports the organization’s digital transformation by turning the user experience’s vision into reality, facilitating positive customer and employee experience, and managing high flexibility, reliability, and scalability levels in a rapidly changing environment. According to Gartner, 90% of companies have already created this role.
The focus of the CXO is on CX (in reality, it involves not only the customer base but any user, including collaborators within the organization). However, its mission is to understand users, the business, and new technologies to plan actions to offer the company products and ensure a smooth exchange of helpful information between the company and its user base.
Toolbox
The CXO makes antediluvian what is recent history. Fresh in our memory are the times when any technological advance was “cooked” in the company’s closed and cryptic IT domains. Moreover, the language spoken was not eligible for ordinary mortals. But those times are gone, thanks to the cross-cutting nature of digital transformation.
Many companies are encouraging the development of applications or solutions without going through IT. Launching a software product without considering users, their needs, tastes, and behaviors is unthinkable. Remember that Gartner defines “citizen developer” as “an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units.”
However, to avoid confusion, the citizen developer concept must be implemented under an umbrella of policies and standards in which the CXO plays a vital role. The CXO must ensure that all initiatives are put at the organization’s service to enable or accelerate efficiency, competitiveness, profitability, or a better customer experience while creating new business models or opening markets.
A culture of innovation
Another critical tool that the CXO can use to multiply the organization’s attractiveness is innovation.
It is essential to establish a culture of innovation within the company, not only by encouraging employees to think out of the box but also by developing empathy (the more we walk in the shoes of others, the more likely we are to meet their needs), motivating curiosity, and continually pushing people out of their comfort zone. Moreover, by allowing mistakes as part of the learning curve, the CXO will make employees feel secure enough to explore options and tread new paths without fear of being “penalized” if the results are not as expected.
The CXO can become the catalyst of the innovation scattered among different sectors and, thus, make the experience consistent throughout the company, and promote sectoral advances that can be applied in other areas. At the same time, it can provide governance that prevents different leaders within the organization from generating conflicting strategies or programs involving UX, eliminates duplicate efforts, and enables a greater level of dialogue across sectors to share information and discuss common problems.
The paths are diverse, and the tools are numerous. But the CXO knows where to go: a better experience that increases the adoption of software products improves the engagement of all users and, fundamentally, makes everyone feel that they are interacting with the best possible organization.