All The Different Kinds Of Customer Experience Roles Explained

Learn more about customer experience (CX) roles, titles & responsibilities — from support agents to CXOs to customer retention leads.
Published on: Nov 29, 2022
Last updated: Dec 19, 2023

TL: DR

  • CX teams focus on onboarding, customer support, and customer success.
  • Responsibilities of CX teams include understanding customer needs, improving customer journeys, and ensuring consistent brand experiences.
  • Support agents provide assistance and respond to customer inquiries.
  • Technical support agents troubleshoot technical issues and provide product implementation help.
  • Customer success managers work with customers to achieve their goals and ensure their success with the product or service.
  • CXOs oversee the customer experience strategy and execution at the executive level.
  • Customer Retention Leads develop strategies to improve customer retention and reduce churn.
  • Customer Lifecycle Managers manage the customer journey and optimize product adoption and training.
  • Directors of Omni-Channel Customer Experience focus on creating a seamless experience across multiple platforms and touchpoints.
  • Directors of Voice of Customer collect and analyze customer feedback to improve the overall CX.
  • All CX roles work together to create a customer-centric culture and continuously improve the customer experience.
  • If you're building a CX team at a startup, consider hiring these roles: CX manager, customer support specialist, customer success specialist, UI/UX designer.
  • If you're building a CX team at a scaleup, consider hiring these roles: CX director, customer support manager, customer success manager, UI/UX designer, CX analyst.
  • If you're building a CX team at an enterprise company, consider hiring these roles: CXO, customer support manager, customer success manager, UI/UX team lead, VoC director, Omni-channel CX director, CX analyst.

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It's more important than ever to create a positive customer experience and keep your customers happy. Simply investing in marketing and sales is no longer enough, especially since the cost of acquiring new customers is five times higher than retaining existing customers.

However, in order to keep customers from churning, you need to deliver an excellent customer experience. And to do that, you need to have the right people in place.

As companies continue to invest in their customer experience (CX) teams, the range of roles and titles available within those teams is expanding. From support agents to customer retention leads, there are many positions that can help improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement.

In this article, we'll discuss the various customer experience roles and titles that are gaining traction today.

What are the core areas of CX?

core cx areas

Before diving into the different customer experience roles and titles, let's discuss the core areas of CX. Generally speaking, there are three main areas when it comes to customer experience:

  • Onboarding
  • Customer support
  • Customer success

Onboarding

Onboarding is the process of getting new customers up and running with your product or service. It's one of the main strategies to increase customer retention and involves the following:

  • Welcoming new customers
  • Building product tours
  • Designing signup and activation flows
  • Introducing them to the features and benefits of your product
  • Helping them set up their accounts
  • Offering training on how to use your product or service

The goal is to ensure that customers are confident in their purchase decision and have a smooth start with your product.

Customer support

Once customers are onboarded, it's important to provide them with ongoing support if they have any questions or issues with your product. This could involve responding to emails, phone calls, and social media requests, as well as offering live chat and troubleshooting services. Here, customer service representatives take on the role of helping customers and providing them with the best possible solutions.

Customer success

Customer success is a more recent area of CX, which focuses on proactively helping customers achieve their desired outcomes. This includes working with customers to identify goals and ways to use your product or service more effectively. Customer success teams provide guidance, advice, and resources that can help customers reach their objectives. 

What are the main responsibilities of a CX team?

CX encompasses everything from a customer's first interaction with your product to the end of their lifecycle with your company. The roles and responsibilities of a CX department are broad but crucial if you want to increase customer satisfaction and increase customer lifetime value.

Some of the roles and responsibilities of a customer experience team include: 

  • Understanding customer needs: CX teams need to understand their customer's needs, preferences and pain points deeply to cater to them.
  • Improving customer journeys: CX teams are in charge of mapping out the customer journey, identifying bottlenecks and implementing strategies to make this journey enjoyable and seamless.
  • Ensuring consistent brand experience: CX teams are in charge of ensuring that the company's brand experience and interaction with customers is cohesive across all touchpoints.
  • Handling customer complaints: Customer support is vital area of customer experience and one of the biggest predictors of customer satisfaction. Resolving customer issues satisfactorily is tantamount to creating excellent customer experiences.
  • Gathering customer feedback: CX teams are responsible for sending out customer surveys, running Voice of Customer (VOC) programs and communicating their findings to the product team.
  • Implementing customer feedback: CX teams are also responsible for analyzing the feedback gathered from customers and then using those insights to make their customer journeys and product better in collaboration with sales, marketing and product teams.
  • Creating a customer-centric culture: CX teams are also instrumental in championing and advocating for the needs of their customers to foster a truly customer-centric culture at their organization.
  • Monitoring key metrics: CX teams own metrics like CSAT, NPS and CES. This necessitates that they continually monitor and track them to make sure they are keeping up with industry standards.
  • Implementing customer loyalty programs: CX teams design and implement customer loyalty programs to ensure that their customers stick with the company.
  • Collaboration with other teams: In order to create the best customer experiences, CX teams must collaborate with other teams — such as product, marketing, and sales — to align strategies and ensure that customers experiences are cohesive.
  • Training and development: CX teams may be responsible for training employees on best practices related to customer service, customer success and empathy, active listening, and other hard and soft skills needed to success at CX.
  • Keeping up with industry trends: Customer experience teams must make sure to stay informed about the latest trends, forecasts and best practices in their field to continually enhance their CX.
  • Crisis management: When times are tough, CX teams play a crucial role in managing customer expectations and assuaging fears.

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Customer experience roles and titles

Some of the core customer experience roles and titles include: 

  • Support agents
  • Technical support agents
  • Customer success managers
  • Chief Customer Officer
  • CX admins

Support agents

Support agents are customer service representatives who provide customers with help and assistance. They are often the first point of contact for customer inquiries, including technical issues and product questions. Support agents should have a good understanding of the product or service, as well as strong communication skills, to provide effective support.

Responsibilities

Customer support agents are often responsible for: 

  • Responding to customer inquiries
  • Proving information about pricing and plans
  • Providing product information
  • Handling complaints
  • Escalating tickets to level 2 and 3 support
  • Resolving issues with payments and billing
  • Providing follow-up support
  • Upselling and cross-selling
  • Maintaining ticketing systems
  • Sending out CSAT surveys

Technical support agents

Technical support agents help customers with technical problems and issues related to the product or service. They should have a good knowledge of IT systems, troubleshooting techniques, and problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a technical support agent include: 

  • Troubleshooting bugs and issues
  • Helping with product implementation
  • Addressing network and connectivity issues
  • Creating technical documentation
  • Remote assistance
  • Performing diagnostic tests

Customer success managers

Customer success managers help customers get the most out of their experience with the product or service. They work closely with customers to identify objectives and provide guidance and advice on how to achieve them. Customer success managers also work internally with teams such as sales, marketing, and support to ensure that customer goals are being met.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a customer success manager include: 

  • Onboarding and implementation
  • Building strong customer relationships
  • Understanding customer goals
  • Monitoring customer health
  • Proactive outreach
  • Customer training and retention including workshops, sessions and training material
  • Expansion by upselling and cross-selling other relevant products and services
  • Monitoring customer success metrics like CSAT and NPS
  • Actively making sure that customers see value in the product and renew their contracts

Chief Customer Officer

The Chief Customer Officer (CCO) is the highest-ranking customer experience role. This executive-level position works to ensure that customers have a great experience with the product or service, including onboarding and support. The CCO also sets strategies for developing relationships with customers, as well as overseeing customer feedback processes.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a CCO include: 

  • Implementing a customer-centric culture
  • Monitoring customer feedback
  • Working with other stakeholders to implement customer feedback
  • Monitoring customer success, experience and support metrics
  • Evaluating customer experience, success and support tools and technology
  • Reporting to top management

CX admins

CX admins are responsible for managing customer information and data, as well as monitoring customer trends. They analyze customer data to identify areas of improvement and develop new strategies for increasing customer satisfaction.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a CX admin include:

  • Data management
  • Customer feedback analysis
  • Managing customer communication channels
  • Customer survey administration
  • Customer advocacy
  • Coordinating with and managing external vendors and suppliers
  • Creating CX reports and documentation

New customer experience roles and titles

Along with the traditional customer experience roles, there are also some new roles that have emerged in recent years to accommodate changing customer needs. These roles include:

  • CXO (Chief Experience Officer)
  • Customer Retention Leads
  • Customer Lifecycle Managers
  • Director of Omni-Channel Customer Experience
  • Director of Voice of Customer

CXO (Chief Experience Officer)

The CXO is responsible for overseeing a company's customer experience strategy and execution from start to finish. They take a holistic view of CX, working with teams such as product, marketing, and sales to ensure that all customer touch-points are consistent and effective. They also work with executive leadership to set overall corporate objectives related to customer service. The role of a CXO is often much broader than that of a CCO, as can be seen when you compare both their responsibilities. Put simply, a CXO is a more strategy-focused role, whereas a CCO is more operationally-focused.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a CCO include: 

  • Making customer experience strategies
  • Overseeing customer journey mapping
  • Implementing a customer-centric culture
  • Monitoring customer feedback
  • Working with other stakeholders to implement customer feedback
  • Driving customer-centric innovation along with the product team
  • Brand reputation management
  • Reporting to top management

Customer Retention Leads

Customer retention leads are responsible for developing and implementing strategies to improve customer retention. This includes analyzing customer feedback on product features, identifying areas of improvement, and creating comprehensive programs to retain current customers.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a customer retention lead include:

  • Creating and implementing customer retention strategies
  • Analyzing customer data and churn
  • Creating and implementing churn-reduction strategies
  • Creating and running customer engagement programs
  • Tracking, monitoring and improving customer retention metrics

Customer Lifecycle Managers

Customer lifecycle managers are responsible for managing the customer journey. This includes understanding customers' needs and expectations, as well as developing strategies to ensure that their experience is positive throughout the entire lifecycle of their product or service.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a customer lifecycle manager include:

  • Customer journey mapping
  • Customer segmentation
  • Monitoring and improving customer lifecycle metrics like CAC (customer acquisition cost) and CLV (customer lifetime value)
  • Collaborating with product teams to make sure product adoption and training is optimized

Director of Omni-Channel Customer Experience

The Director of Omni-Channel Customer Experience is responsible for developing and managing omni-channel customer experiences. This includes understanding customers' interactions with the brand across multiple platforms, as well as designing strategies to ensure a seamless experience for customers no matter where they come in contact with your company.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a Director of Omni-Channel Customer Experience include:

  • Developing a comprehensive omni-channel strategy
  • Integrating different channels and customer touchpoints
  • Implementing an omni-channel tech stack
  • Executive reporting

Director of Voice of Customer

The Director of Voice of Customer is responsible for collecting and analyzing customer feedback. They identify trends in customer feedback and use this data to develop strategies for improving a company's CX.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a Director of Voice of Customer include: 

  • Developing a comprehensive VoC strategy that addresses how customer feedback will be gathered, analyzed and implemented
  • Customer feedback conclusion
  • Customer insights and reporting with actionable recommendations
  • Overseeing NPS (net promoter score) programs
  • Competitive analysis

Building a customer experience team

We've already covered how to structure your customer support team as your company scales. In this post, we'll do the same thing for CX teams. 

As your company grows, you'll need to add more people to your customer experience team. But how do you know how many people to add and which of the different CX roles to fill?

The answer depends on a number of factors, including:

  • The size of your customer base
  • The average revenue per customer
  • The average customer lifetime value
  • The number of customer touchpoints
  • The frequency of customer interactions
  • Your product, service or industry

In the following sections, we'll cover a few ways that startups, scaleups and enterprise companies should structure their CX team, as well as the CX roles they should hire at each stage.

Building a CX team at a startup

startup cx team structure

At a startup, resources tend to be limited and teams often wear multiple hats. In light of this, a customer experience team at a startup should be relatively small and integrated with other departments.

The CX roles to hire at a startup include:

  • CX Manager (Responsible for overall CX strategy and coordination)
  • Customer Support Specialist (Provides frontline support to customers)
  • Customer Success Specialist (Focuses on ensuring customer success and retention)
  • UX/UI Designer (Enhances the user experience)

Building a CX team at a scaleup

scaleup cx team structure

As you company scales, you'll need to expand your CX teams to meet growing customer demands.

The CX roles you should hire at a scaleup include:

  • CX Director (Oversees the entire CX department and strategy)
  • Customer Support Manager (Manages the support team and escalations)
  • Customer Success Manager (Manages customer relationships and retention)
  • UX/UI Designer (Works on improving user experience)
  • CX Analyst (Analyzes data and customer feedback for insights)

Building a CX team as an enterprise company

enterprise cx team structure

If you are a well-established and large company, your CX team is bound to get more complex and may include hundreds of people with specialized roles.

The CX titles you should fill at a enterprise company are: 

  • CXO (Leads the entire CX department and strategy)
  • Customer Support Manager (Manages support operations and teams)
  • Customer Success Manager (Manages customer relationships and success)
  • UX/UI Team Lead (Oversees the design and user experience team)
  • CX Analyst (Analyzes and interprets customer data)
  • Director of Voice of Customer (VOC): (Gathers and acts on customer feedback)
  • Director of Omni-Channel CX (Integrates all CX touchpoints and ensures a cohesive brand experience)

Conclusion

Creating a positive customer experience and retaining customers are critical for business success. Customer experience (CX) teams play a vital role in understanding customer needs, improving customer journeys, and fostering a customer-centric culture.

Some core responsibilities of CX teams include gathering and analyzing customer feedback, improving customer support, ensuring consistent brand experiences, and monitoring key metrics like CSAT, NPS, and CES.

Traditional CX roles such as Support Agents, Technical Support Agents, and Customer Success Managers have well-defined responsibilities, while newer roles like CXOs, Customer Retention Leads, Customer Lifecycle Managers, Directors of Omni-Channel Customer Experience, and Directors of Voice of Customer address specific aspects of the customer experience journey.

These roles collectively work to create a seamless and exceptional customer experience, which is essential for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall business growth.

Author

Shifa Rahaman

Content Marketing Manager

Contributor

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