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In 2016, I was studying for my customer experience professional qualification. I remember feeling like a carefree student again. Remember that buzz you get when something new clicks into place? I filled a little red book with notes. Six core competencies. Frameworks. Models. Definitions. Pages and pages of it.
I loved it. Not just because I enjoy learning, but because I’d found a language I didn’t know I’d been searching for.
I was a marketer at the time. I already cared about customer insight and behaviour. But what I was studying felt bigger than the work I’d been doing. It had words for things I’d been noticing but couldn’t name, like the gap between what businesses intend and what customers actually feel. The invisible stuff. The emotional weight of an experience. The meaning that accumulates across touchpoints. Care as a business discipline. I remember feeling slightly shocked at how much that single word could contain.
Marketing was starting to feel like a couple of chapters. And here I was flicking through the whole book. That was 2016, and I’ve never looked back.
I’m a CX leader, and I still use those foundations every week. But customer experience leadership looks quite different ten years on. The foundations weren’t wrong. The remit is just wider now. And I keep wondering whether we’re describing one role or actually combining several.
What’s Changed Around the Role
To understand what’s happened to customer experience leadership, it helps to look at what’s happened to the conditions around the job.
Economic pressure has tightened significantly. There’s less tolerance for ambiguity in investment decisions. Every function (including CX) is being asked to prove its commercial relevance more continuously than before.
At the same time, customer expectations have risen alongside digital maturity. People experience something seamless in one context and carry that expectation everywhere. The bar moves with the best experience they’ve had, regardless of industry.
Then there’s technology. AI and automation have shifted from being things organisations experimented with to being embedded in how journeys actually work. When technology becomes infrastructure rather than experiment, the experience decisions aren’t happening in CX conversations anymore. They’re happening in technical ones. Earlier. With different people in the room. Often before the CX leader is anywhere near them.
Those three forces; economic pressure, rising customer expectations, and technology moving from optional to embedded have changed the context within which CX leadership operates.
What I want to think through is whether the role has kept pace with that. Or whether there’s a gap forming between what the job looks like on paper and what it actually requires in practice.
What Customer Experience Leadership Now Requires
When I look at what’s being asked of CX leaders now, compared to what the role required ten years ago, a few things stand out.
Data fluency, but not in the way we used to mean it. Not creating and using dashboards, which has always been part of the work. Something more than that. An understanding of data as operating infrastructure. Where it comes from, how it flows, and what happens when it degrades or fragments. The shift from descriptive insight to predictive capability. The commercial interpretation that links data decisions to customer and financial outcomes. That’s a different kind of fluency than we were asked for in 2016.
AI and automation literacy. Not writing code or becoming a technologist. But understanding where automation enhances an experience and where it erodes it. Being able to hold a considered position in rooms where technical decisions are being made, rather than being handed the consequences of those decisions after the fact. If you’re new to using AI at work, Episode 5 covers some basic literacy for Retail Professionals.
Systems thinking across the full end-to-end journey. Not just mapping touchpoints, but understanding the operational dependencies underneath them. The way friction in one part of a journey is often caused by a decision made somewhere else entirely. The way a handover between teams that feels fine internally can feel completely disjointed to the person experiencing it.
Commercial fluency. The ability to speak in the language of customer lifetime value, cost-to-serve trade-offs, and investment prioritisation. Not to lead with that language, but to use it. Because the decisions that shape customer experience increasingly live in conversations where that’s the currency.
Governance and ethics. Privacy, consent, the ethical use of data and AI, and the trust implications of personalisation have moved from compliance conversations into experience design conversations. What a customer is willing to share, and under what conditions, is now part of how a journey works. Or doesn’t.
And then the two that have probably always been there but feel more acute now: influencing across functions without formal authority, and what I’d describe as emotional intelligence at scale. Not empathy in individual interactions, but the ability to embed care into systems. To protect human moments inside increasingly automated journeys.
That’s a wide brief. I’m not sure whether it represents the natural evolution of a maturing profession or whether something else is happening.
What’s Happening in UK Retail Right Now
If you look at where CX capability is actually being built in UK retail, something interesting emerges.
John Lewis Partnership has been investing heavily in modernisation — supply chain, technology, and operational infrastructure. The improvements customers experience aren’t primarily coming from service training or journey workshops. They’re coming from decisions made deep in the operating system.
When Marks and Spencer updated their customer leadership structure, they brought in someone with a background in digital and AI service design. There are no Customer or Customer Experience officers at the same level.
Tesco’s Clubcard has evolved from a loyalty scheme into what they describe as personalised missions — using purchase data to understand where a customer is in their life and shape the experience accordingly.
Next more than doubled its technology spend over five years (2019-2024), from £97m to over £200m, and now employs more people developing technology than working in its product teams. When a retailer crosses that line, it’s worth asking where experience decisions are being made now.
Boots has been using AI to personalise the online shopper journey, led not by a CX function, but by its Chief Digital Officer. The experience improvement is real. The ownership sits elsewhere.
Currys partnered with Accenture and Microsoft in 2024 to overhaul its core cloud infrastructure, describing the goal as enhancing the shopping experience. The customer outcome is a CX ambition. The execution is a technology programme.
And Sainsbury’s announced a wholesale commercial systems transformation with SAP, Accenture and AWS, with the stated aim of enabling more personalised customer value.
In each case, the experience improvements that matter most to customers are being executed through infrastructure. Through data capability. Through technology. Through decisions that live outside the traditional CX function.
Which means the CX leader who operates only within their own team is working with less and less of the picture.
What This Feels Like From Inside the Role
There’s a phrase I came across in Forrester’s 2026 CX predictions that I keep returning to. It describes something called the Panini Effect – the squeeze that CX teams feel between the enormous investment demands of AI on one side, and relentless corporate pressure to cut costs on the other. No room to move. Heat from both directions.
I think that image is useful. Because what I keep hearing from people in these roles is something close to that.
Accountability that keeps expanding. Authority that doesn’t always keep pace. Being expected to bridge commercial, technical, and human domains simultaneously, while the decisions that actually shape those domains often sit somewhere else.
There’s a particular version of this I often think about: the experience of being accountable for outcomes you can clearly see but don’t fully control. Knowing that the friction a customer feels at checkout is rooted in a data integration decision made eighteen months ago. Or knowing that the handover between digital and in-store isn’t seamless because of an organisational structure you inherited.
Being responsible without having all the levers. That’s not a new experience for senior professionals. In customer experience leadership, though, it seems to be becoming a defining condition of the role rather than the exception.
The Other Reading
There’s another way of looking at all of this.
The reason the CX role is being asked to hold more (more data literacy, more commercial fluency, more systems thinking, more cross-functional influence) might not be a sign that the role is under strain. It might be a sign that it’s finally being taken seriously.
For a long time, Customer Experience sat at the edges of strategic conversations. Invited to present the latest scores. Consulted after the decisions had already been made. Valued in principle, sidestepped in practice.
What’s shifting (in some organisations at least) is that customer thinking is being pulled earlier. Into technology decisions. Into commercial planning. Into how organisations are structured. That’s not compression. That’s influence. And it’s what the discipline has been making the case for for years.
So the expanding brief might be less about more being piled onto the same role, and more about the role finally moving closer to where the real decisions happen.
The question is whether the conditions around it have kept pace. Whether the authority, the resource, and the organisational design have followed the ambition. Because influence without those things is still a difficult place to work from.
What’s Worth Paying Attention To in Your Own Organisation
I’m not going to offer conclusions here. But I think there are a few things to pay attention to.
The gap between advocacy and action. Sometimes you’ll see a team that’s still primarily in advocacy mode — making the case for customers, telling the story, producing the insight — while the decisions that actually shape what customers experience have moved somewhere else. Into technology. Into operations. Into infrastructure. That gap can be invisible for a long time. It usually shows up eventually in the experience itself.
Journey mapping – the practice and the purpose. Journey mapping sometimes gets positioned as a relic, something from an older, simpler CX toolkit. I don’t think that’s right. The issue isn’t the practice. It’s who’s in the room when it happens. Done well, it was never just a CX exercise. It was always meant to be the thing that gets operations, technology, and data people looking at the same picture — so they can design their systems around what customers actually experience. Where it goes wrong is when it becomes a document produced by the CX team and shared with everyone else. A deliverable rather than a conversation. The map isn’t the point. The alignment it creates is.
Where automation enters the journey and why. There’s a real difference between a deliberate design choice (deciding that this part of the experience genuinely works better with less human involvement) and a cost decision that gets dressed up as one. Customers don’t always notice the difference immediately. But they tend to notice eventually.
What the expanding remit actually comes with. The authority? The cross-functional relationships? Organisational permission to be in rooms where decisions are being made? Or is what’s being described as evolution actually just more of the same?
The Structural Question
The question of what happens to the CX leader role over the next decade has a few possible answers. Here are two that point in almost opposite directions.
In one version, the role becomes smaller and sharper. A centre of expertise that owns the methodology, translates insight, and sets standards, while other teams carry their own slice of customer responsibility. The CX leader connects and quality-guards, rather than trying to personally hold everything.
In another version, the role gets bigger. As organisations become more horizontal and cross-functional, someone still has to hold the whole picture. The remit expands rather than contracts. Which is closer to the Chief Customer Officer model: broader authority or enterprise-wide scope.
Both are already happening in different organisations. Some larger retailers are beginning to formalise that structural response. These CCO or CXO roles are more established in the US than in the UK, and in UK retail specifically, they remain relatively rare. Most CX leaders here are navigating this without that architecture around them.
The question worth thinking about is which version is happening in your organisation, and if the structure around you is set up to make either one work.
Because the version where CX thinking travels, where operations, technology, and finance are making decisions with the customer in mind without needing to be told, that requires something most organisations haven’t fully built yet. A shared language. Integrated forums. Mutual accountability. The CX leader as the person who makes sure the knowledge moves, not the person who holds it all.
FAQ
What skills does a CX leader need now that they didn’t ten years ago?
The conversation has expanded considerably. Data literacy beyond dashboards: understanding how data flows and what happens when it fragments. AI and automation literacy, not technical expertise, but enough understanding to hold a considered position in rooms where those decisions are made. Commercial fluency, so you can speak in the language of investment decisions, not just customer satisfaction scores. And governance awareness, because the ethics of data and personalisation have become experience design questions, not just compliance ones.
How is customer experience leadership changing in UK retail?
In a number of major UK retailers, the decisions that most directly shape what customers experience are being made in technology programmes, infrastructure projects, and data capability investments often led by functions outside the traditional CX team. That shift means the CX leader who operates primarily within their own function has less and less of the picture. Whether that’s a crisis or an opportunity depends largely on whether the role has the authority and cross-functional access to match.
Is journey mapping still useful?
Yes, but the way it’s often used has drifted from its purpose. Journey mapping done well was never just a CX exercise; it was always a cross-functional conversation that gets operations, technology, and data people looking at the same picture. When it becomes a document produced by the CX team and shared with everyone else, it loses most of its value. The practice remains sound. The application is often where it goes wrong.
What is the Panini Effect in customer experience?
The term comes from Forrester’s 2026 predictions. It describes the squeeze CX teams feel between significant investment demands for AI on one side and ongoing pressure to cut costs on the other. Many CX leaders recognise it: accountability that keeps expanding, while the resources and authority to act don’t always follow.
What’s the difference between a CX leader and a Chief Customer Officer?
A Chief Customer Officer typically holds a broader, enterprise-wide scope and authority that spans commercial, operational, and technology decisions, not just the CX function. Most CX leaders in UK retail operate without that structure, navigating the same expanding brief with less formal authority. Both models are developing in practice; which is right depends on the organisation and whether the conditions support it.
How do you lead customer experience without formal authority?
Through commercial fluency, strong cross-functional relationships, and being present in the rooms where decisions are made, rather than arriving after the fact to manage their consequences. It requires making CX thinking useful to people who don’t think of themselves as CX professionals, so the knowledge travels rather than sitting with one team.
Closing Reflection
Customer experience leadership has changed considerably since I qualified as a CCXP, but the foundations I built still matter: voice of the customer, journey thinking, service culture. I use that thinking all the time.
Ten years on, I still don’t think there’s one answer to what this role is becoming. And I’m not sure there should be.
The same evidence (the expanding brief, the new skill requirements, the infrastructure decisions happening elsewhere) can be read two ways. Either the role is being asked to carry more than it was designed for. Or it’s finally being invited into more conversations that actually matter.
Both are probably true in different organisations. Maybe in different weeks of the same organisation.
The question worth taking away is which one reflects your reality right now and whether the conditions around you match the version of the role you’re actually being asked to play.
