Who Owns the Customer Experience?

Despite the vast technological and attitudinal changes in customer experience delivery over many decades, many organizations still don’t know where to put CX, Forrester Research concludes in a new report.

In fact, at many organizations, no one department owns the function, the research firm found, noting that the CX function can sit in many places on an org chart and determining the right location for the CX function requires evaluating many complex variables.

“A customer’s experience is the result of a collective effort and not confined to one function,” admits Clint Riley, chief operating officer of Globe Midwest Adjusters International, a property insurance claims company. “Marketing sets expectations via branding and early touchpoints. Sales strengthens initial perceptions through more personalized interactions and customization. Support and operations resolve post-sale issues and ensure seamless delivery of promises made. Even finance and IT influence customer perceptions about the company through accuracy in billing and support of digital tools. No single department operates in a CX void.”

The best-performing companies have learned that customer experience isn’t owned by a single department, agrees Paula Mantle, vice president of marketing at Branch, a linking and measurement services and solutions provider. “Marketing shapes the first promise. Sales reinforces trust in real time. Product determines whether the experience is intuitive or frustrating. Customer success and support define how a brand shows up when things don’t go perfectly. Even finance, legal, and operations play a role in how easy or painful it is to be a customer.”

Jonathan Moran, head of martech solutions marketing at SAS, shares that sentiment as well. CX cannot sit within the confines of a single department, though the CX management responsibility differs from department to department and from organization to organization, he says.

“At SAS, we have a CX and engagement sub-function that advises on CX and advocacy, offering tips and tricks, but they don’t fully own it,” Moran adds. “CX breaks down when it is owned by one team. No single function has the full view of customer interactions, preferences, frustrations, and needs to fully manage it from end to end.”

Mantle adds that when CX is owned by one team, it usually becomes a siloed initiative. Leadership should align teams around a common definition of a great experience, shared metrics that cut across the funnel, and systems that ensure context travels with the customer. From a marketing perspective, this is critical. Brand is less what we say and more what customers experience repeatedly. Every handoff or interaction either compounds trust or quietly chips away at it.”

From the top down, CX must be a core value that is embedded into any organization’s DNA by leadership, according to Riley. “Every department’s work—their goals, processes, metrics, and incentives—should support the company’s mission and vision, which should ultimately serve the customer.”

When data, insights, and decision rights flow across divisions, CX becomes a shared responsibility, and organizations are finally able to deliver consistent, meaningful experiences at scale, Moran explains.

However, with shared management, the question that arises is who sets the expectation for CX and who gets the benefit or blame if CX performs better or worse than expected.

According to Moran, the most likely answer is the head of customer service or customer success. The head of sales might be considered the most responsible for success or failure if the measuring stick is sales conversions, though if conversions are the result of superior marketing efforts, the CMO might get the credit, or the blame if conversions are subpar.

“It depends on the view the executives at the organization have on what single part of the organization carried the most weight in improving [or not improving] CX,” he adds.

Involving all facets of the organization in CX produces numerous benefits, according to Mackenzie Smith, vice president of customer growth at ASAPP, a provider of contact center software.

When cross-functional teams align around a unified vision of customer value, Smith says, they create something remarkable: Every interaction reinforces what matters most to their business.

She says that relying on cross-functional teams provides the following three advantages:

• Strategic investment: Product builds features informed by support insights. Marketing creates expectations that operations enthusiastically fulfill. Teams optimize for the complete customer journey, making decisions that compound rather than conflict.
• Accountability: When teams share responsibility for customer outcomes, they naturally collaborate at handoff points. The customer experiences a coherent business rather than disconnected functions.
• Innovation: If customer experience becomes everyone’s mandate, changes happen faster. Input flows naturally across functions during design and execution, not as an afterthought or in response to negative feedback.

This requires executive-level commitment, Smith adds. Cross-functional teams need clear decision rights and metrics that transcend departmental boundaries.

“Great customer experiences happen when entire organizations agree on what excellence looks like and align their choices to deliver it,” Smith says. “That shared vision, reinforced through every department’s daily work, is what transforms transactional relationships into lasting partnerships.”

To successfully operate in this way, though, requires organizations to democratize the following three key elements, according to Moran:

• Data: A unified customer data repository ensures all teams work from the same source of truth. When data sits in silos, communication becomes ad hoc and inconsistent. A centralized platform prevents duplication, strengthens customer profiles, and enables coordinated action.
• Insights: Employees across the organization must understand customer sentiment, loyalty, value, and behavior. When teams, from marketing to the contact center, share context, they can tailor interactions appropriately. For instance, knowing a customer has reached out repeatedly about an unresolved issue directly shapes how that next conversation should unfold.
• Action: Empowered frontline employees can resolve issues quickly by offering discounts, waiving fees, or adjusting processes. This improves both employee morale and customer satisfaction.

But still, not everyone is on board with the cross-functional approach. Rishi Rana, CEO of Cyara, regularly hears from customers that their chatbots are owned by one team, their contact center phone lines by another, and so on. This fragmentation, he says, is a huge business mistake, leading to disjointed data, inconsistent customer service, and inevitably broken customer trust.

Is It the CXO?

At some firms, a newly created C-level position called chief customer officer is the answer.

“CX has evolved,” says Lyndsey Valin, chief customer officer of SugarCRM. “In the early [software-as-a-service] days, chief customer officer wasn’t even a job. That has certainly emerged because SaaS software is certainly different from on-premises software.”

For many firms, the chief customer officer is the one who owns CX, according to Valin. “But when I think of CX, it isn’t just the product. It isn’t just the customer success team that you work with. It’s really a sum of all of those parts.”

Valin adds: “As consumers, you want any experience that you have with companies to be easy, intuitive, and impactful. So I just look at CX as that end-to-end experience for the customer, from the way they deal with the commercial teams in the sales cycle, to the way that they contact you, to the way that they interface with the post-sales teams. It’s the sum of all of those parts that can make or break the customer experience.”

Is It Marketing? Sales?

Sandeep Menon, cofounder and CEO of Auxia, a provider of an AI-native, agentic customer journey orchestration platform, narrows down the concept of “everyone” owning CX to the marketing and sales teams.

“The customer journey is a single continuous arc, and, therefore, ownership must be shared equally between both marketing and sales teams,” Menon explains. “There has historically been friction between these two teams, primarily due to critical information being dropped as these teams communicate on an ongoing basis.”

Customers don’t care who “owns” CX, they only care about the relevance, quality, and speed of the interaction, Menon adds. When businesses rely on a dozen different tools to manage their marketing stacks, they create data silos that prevent a necessary unified view of the customer profile.

The best way to avoid the issue is marketing and sales’ co-ownership of CX and leveraging smart tools that support this partnership, Menon says. “Sales and marketing teams need to operate from a central source of truth. Agentic AI that analyzes behavior and surfaces insights can be helpful in this. Businesses that will be the most successful in this AI era are the ones that can successfully orchestrate the entire customer life cycle—ensuring every touchpoint stays positive, personalized, and relevant regardless of who is managing it.”

Is It the IT Department?

Yet others hold the position that the IT department has a leading role in the CX play.

“The true ‘engine room’ of CX is now the tech department,” says Cyndee Harrison, principal at Synaptic, a marketing and public relations firm. “The reality is that in the digital-first realities of business in 2026, everything from processing the right coffee order at the corner donut shop to complex e-commerce purchases, the customer experience is the interface.”

Though CX has traditionally come under the marketing or sales umbrella, even the smallest companies today are using at least rudimentary technology tools to understand who their customers are, according to Harrison. “It breaks my heart to say it because I’m a dyed-in-the-wool marketer. But the fact of the matter is that CX belongs to the technology department for a few different reasons.”

If technology doesn’t support the brand promise, nothing else matters, Harrison explains. Additionally, technology is responsible for protecting the customer data that it collects. If it fails to do so, CX declines, sometimes precipitously, regardless of how good the product, marketing, or sales are.

“We are in an age in which CX is not an interruption of the IT department’s work; it’s actually the central purpose of their work,” Harrison says. The IT department is the one that can most directly remove any friction (slow response times, disconnected experiences, etc.) that the customer incurs to preserve and improve CX.

She adds that when the tech department owns the CX stack, the experience becomes scalable, personalized, and functional. Without that, the customer experience is just a promise that the company can’t keep.

Is It the Contact Center?

For customers, the contact center represents their single most important moment of truth. It is where they go when a product fails, a service is confusing, or a critical query needs answering, according to Jeff Palmer, chief revenue officer at Upstream Works, a provider of contact center software..

“An automated, frictionless interaction powered by AI, matched with an empathetic and effective human response, can salvage a negative situation,” Palmer explains. “The combination of efficiency and compassion turns detractors into loyal advocates.”

Conversely, long hold times, unhelpful agents, or having to repeat information across multiple channels can instantly erode brand trust, regardless of how superior the core product might be, Palmer adds. “The human-to-human interaction or the perceived ease of digital self-service directly defines the emotional relationship a customer has with the brand.”

Direct responsibility for the success or failure of the contact center’s relationship with the customer could be the customer service manager, though the responsibility for serious CX problems within the contact center could flow all the way up to the C-suite, according to Palmer.

The Answer: It Depends!

Who gets the credit or the blame depends largely on where CX is succeeding or breaking down, according to Palmer. For example, some contact centers adopted what they thought was advanced AI that would increase efficiency and provide customers with quick, accurate answers and better service. But once the technology was deployed, it didn’t perform as expected. If that’s the case, the chief information officer could be held responsible. If it’s a human problem within the contact center, the responsibility is more likely to fall on whoever is heading that operation.

But in the end, “where CX lives is very dependent on the outcomes that people are trying to derive,” Palmer concludes. And most others agree.

“Between my own experience leading a CX function and working with literally hundreds of CX leaders around the world, I have yet to encounter one cookie-cutter template that makes sense as the place to put a CX function,” concluded Judy Weader, a principal analyst at Forrester, in a recent blog post. “The right answer really is ‘It depends.’”

So on what does it depend? Forrester identified multiple factors and variables that influence the best possible home for the CX function.

First, reporting directly to the CEO sounds great in theory, particularly when the CEO understands that improving CX leads to better business benefits. But if the CEO doesn’t have the bandwidth for another direct report or isn’t on board with CX, the increased visibility without sufficient executive support will lead to failure, according to Weader.

Second, since not every CX function can or should be at the top of the org chart, the CX leader’s ability to build advocates and allies is a critical success factor.

And finally, the CX function might not stay in the same place forever, according to Weader. Businesses are dynamic, she said, noting that corporate strategies change, executives leave and get replaced, and org charts get shuffled. While it might make sense for the CX function to report to Executive A today, some change might make it more logical for it to report to Executive B tomorrow, she said. 

Phillip Britt is a freelance writer based in the Chicago area. He can be reached at spenterprises1@comcast.net.