• Adweek, Wednesday, December 12, 2007 11:32 AM

As customers have become more outspoken about what they buy and whom they buy it from, many companies have responded by putting aside a corner office for a chief customer experience officer, often called the CXO. The position has a range of titles, but in general reports to the CEO, cuts across the product and channel boundaries and includes a significant marketing component.

The job can be quite different from one company to the next, sometimes overseeing every detail of a brand's messaging and interaction with consumers and other times serving as an emergency resource to handle service complaints and crises. A Forrester Research study concludes that smart CXOs realize they are faced with nothing less than a "multi-year campaign to change their organization's culture" and their most dramatic results will come as employee attitudes and behavior "adjust across the organization."

The position started appearing in 2005. By early 2007, about one-fourth of companies surveyed by Forrester had a senior executive in charge of an enterprise-wide customer experience effort. Financial services were an early convert to the approach; by mid-2007, 54% of North American banks had a CXO.

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