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What does a Chief Customer Officer do, what should you pay them, where do the best CCOs come from and how do you appoint the right one? Drawing on Douglas Jackson’s long running research into the UK Chief Customer Officer market.
The Chief Customer Officer has become one of the more interesting roles to watch at Executive level.
Not simply because more organisations are appointing one, but because what sits underneath the title has changed considerably.
We have been tracking Chief Customer Officers and senior customer leadership appointments for many years at Douglas Jackson. During that time, we have seen the role move from something that was often closely associated with Marketing, Sales or Customer Service to a much broader leadership mandate spanning customer experience, operations, transformation, commercial performance and, increasingly, insight, analytics, technology and data.
But there is also far more variation behind the title than perhaps exists with more established C-suite positions.
Two organisations can both be recruiting a Chief Customer Officer and actually be looking for quite different leaders.
That matters when you’re hiring one.
What does a Chief Customer Officer actually do?
At its broadest, the Chief Customer Officer owns the organisation’s customer agenda across functions rather than simply managing a customer department.
That distinction is important.
A Customer Service Director might own contact centres, complaints, service performance and frontline operations. A Customer Experience Director might be responsible for journey design, insight, experience strategy and improvement.
The CCO is generally expected to operate across those organisational boundaries.
The strongest CCOs we see act as connectors. They understand the customer, but they can also translate what they are seeing into decisions about operations, technology, proposition, retention, growth and commercial performance.
And increasingly, that ability to operate beyond the traditional boundaries of the role is becoming important.
The question isn’t simply:
Can this person improve customer experience?
It’s:
Can they use customer understanding to influence how the organisation performs?
That is a much bigger job.
How common is the Chief Customer Officer role in the UK?
When we first started tracking the CCO population, it was still a relatively unusual appointment in the UK.
In 2020, our research identified fewer than 200 Chief Customer Officers across LinkedIn and our own executive database. That population has since grown beyond 1,000 (2025 data) when Chief Client Officer variants are included.
But I think the more interesting story is what has happened inside that growth.
Organisations haven’t simply added more CCOs. They have continued to experiment with where customer accountability should sit and what should belong with it.
We’ve seen customer combined with Operations. Customer and Brand. Customer and Commercial. Customer and Transformation.
And we’re now seeing the wider Executive landscape shift again as Technology, Data and AI become increasingly important to customer and operational performance.
That’s why I wouldn’t start a CCO search with the title.
I’d start with the problem the organisation wants the person to solve.
Chief Customer Officer vs Chief Experience Officer: what’s the difference?
There is inevitably some overlap, and titles alone can be misleading.
Chief Experience Officer roles have grown alongside CCO appointments, particularly within Technology, Marketing/Research and Financial Services according to our research.
But rather than becoming too fixed about the distinction, I would look at the mandate.
What does the person actually own?
What decisions can they make?
What outcomes are they accountable for?
And what sits elsewhere in the Executive team?
An impressive title with limited organisational authority can be considerably less powerful than a Director level role with genuine ownership of the levers required to change customer outcomes.
We wrote about this recently in our Leadership Signals piece, Bigger Jobs. Same Problems.
One person can own an outcome while five other people control the things required to deliver it.
That isn’t necessarily empowerment. Sometimes it is simply broader accountability.
So before deciding whether you need a CCO, CXO or Customer Experience Director, define the organisational problem first.
Where do Chief Customer Officers come from?
This is probably one of the biggest changes we’ve seen.
In our earlier research, 58% of Chief Customer Officers came from Sales or Marketing backgrounds, while just 15% had come through Customer Service or Contact Centre leadership.
Then later analysis of 210 CCOs looked markedly different.
Customer Service and Customer Experience backgrounds moved to represent 25%, Marketing 23% and Operations 22%.
For me, that’s more than an interesting change in the numbers.
It suggests organisations have changed what they expect their senior customer leaders to be able to do, however it also shows that organisations continue to appoint very different types of backgrounds to the role.
The role has become more operational, more commercial, more data-led and considerably more connected to transformation and organisational performance.
It also means there isn’t a single career path that produces a good CCO.
Someone coming through Marketing may bring proposition, brand and commercial capability. An Operations leader may understand delivery, scale and execution. A Customer Service or CX leader may bring much deeper understanding of customer behaviour, journeys and service economics.
The question is not which background is best.
It is which background best matches the mandate you are actually hiring for and perhaps even more importantly which individual has the capability to lead on these initiatives and delivery your required business, customer and commercial outcomes.
Which sectors hire the most Chief Customer Officers?
Our current data shows Technology as the largest employer of CCOs at 27.8%, followed by Financial Services at 20.9% and Utilities at 13.8%.
Again, though, the numbers only tell part of the story.
The reason an organisation needs a CCO varies significantly by sector.
In a regulated business, Utilities and Housing Associations for example, the mandate may involve vulnerable customers, complaints, regulatory outcomes and rebuilding trust.
In SaaS or Technology, retention, customer success, ARR and lifetime value may dominate.
In Insurance or Financial Services, the relationship between customer experience, digital journeys, regulation, consumer duty and commercial performance can create a very different brief again.
Which is why simply finding somebody who has previously held the title “Chief Customer Officer” is rarely enough.
Context matters.
What does a Chief Customer Officer get paid?
Our salary research puts UK Chief Customer Officer base salaries between £120,000 and £350,000, depending on the scale and complexity of the organisation and the scope of the mandate which also makes this a very difficult first appointment. Getting the right advice and the right approach to market is critical to land this role correctly first time.
Across our data, the average base salary is £169,400.
But salary benchmarking C-suite roles needs some care.
A £150,000 CCO responsible for a relatively contained customer function is not necessarily comparable with a £250,000 CCO responsible for Customer, Operations, Digital and Transformation across a large regulated organisation.
Title is only one variable.
When we benchmark these appointments, we therefore look at organisational scale, sector, remit, reporting line, team, commercial accountability and complexity rather than simply matching one CCO salary against another.
When should you hire a Chief Customer Officer?
There isn’t a single trigger, but there are some recurring ones.
Customer accountability may have become fragmented across the organisation.
Customer satisfaction or retention may be deteriorating.
The organisation may be embarking on significant transformation.
Growth may have exposed weaknesses in service or operating models.
Or the CEO and Board may simply recognise that the customer has considerable strategic importance but nobody around the Executive table genuinely owns the whole picture.
But I’d add another question before creating the role:
What will this person be able to change that cannot be changed today?
If the answer isn’t clear, the organisation may not yet have defined the mandate properly.
Creating a C-suite title doesn’t automatically solve fragmented accountability.
Should you promote an internal candidate or hire an external CCO?
Both can work.
An internal leader brings organisational knowledge, established relationships and an understanding of how decisions really get made.
An external appointment can bring different operating models, fresh challenge and experience of solving a problem the organisation hasn’t tackled before.
I wouldn’t make this primarily a question about speed or cost.
I’d ask whether the next phase requires continuity or something genuinely different.
If the organisation needs to accelerate an existing strategy, an internal candidate may be extremely strong.
If it needs to challenge assumptions, redesign an operating model or introduce capability the business doesn’t currently possess, looking externally becomes much more important.
What does a good Chief Customer Officer hire look like?
This is where CV led recruitment becomes dangerous.
The obvious candidate isn’t always the right candidate.
At this level, most credible people will have impressive experience. They will have run sizeable teams, delivered transformation and operated with senior stakeholders.
That gets them into the conversation.
It doesn’t necessarily predict whether they will succeed in your organisation.
We look for evidence that a CCO can connect customer outcomes with commercial and operational performance; influence at Board and Executive level; deliver rather than simply design strategy; and operate successfully at comparable scale and complexity.
But there is another layer.
How do they lead?, how do they make decisions?, how do they respond when challenged? and, can they influence people whose resources they need but don’t control?
And will the environment they are entering allow them to operate in the way that made them successful elsewhere?
Those questions are considerably harder to answer from a CV.
They are also often the questions that determine whether the appointment works.
Why do Chief Customer Officer hires fail?
Sometimes the wrong person is appointed.
But sometimes the role itself has been designed to fail.
We regularly see some combination of unclear ownership, insufficient Executive sponsorship and a disconnect between an organisation’s stated customer ambition and the operational reality underneath it.
A business may recruit somebody to transform customer experience while Technology owns the systems, Operations owns delivery, Marketing owns proposition, Finance controls investment and individual business units retain their own priorities.
The CCO owns the outcome.
Everybody else owns the levers.
That can work if the organisation has deliberately designed the decision rights and Executive relationships around it.
It becomes much harder when it hasn’t.
So when a senior customer appointment doesn’t work, I wouldn’t only ask whether the individual was good enough.
I’d also ask whether the organisation gave them a realistic opportunity to succeed.
Why is it difficult to recruit an experienced Chief Customer Officer?
Because the relevant talent pool becomes much smaller once you stop searching by title.
There may be plenty of people called Chief Customer Officer.
There are far fewer who have solved your particular problem, at comparable scale, in an environment with similar complexity.
And some of the strongest potential candidates may not currently be CCOs at all.
They may be COOs, Customer Directors, Transformation leaders or executives with broader operational and commercial mandates.
The best people are also frequently not actively looking for another role.
That’s where executive search should add value.
Not by producing more CVs.
By defining what success actually requires and then identifying the people most capable of delivering it — including those the organisation wouldn’t necessarily have thought to look for.
Is the CCO becoming a route to CEO?
Potentially, and this is something we’re watching closely rather than something I think we can yet state as a settled trend.
The logic is certainly there.
A genuinely enterprise level CCO can develop exposure to customers, commercial performance, operations, transformation, technology and the Board.
That’s a useful breadth of experience for somebody with CEO ambitions.
But once again, the title isn’t enough.
The CCOs most likely to broaden into enterprise leadership will be those who can demonstrate that they have done considerably more than improve customer metrics.
They will have to show that they have influenced the performance and direction of the business.
And perhaps that’s the bigger story behind the evolution of the Chief Customer Officer.
The role is becoming less about representing the customer and more about using customer understanding to make better business decisions.
That’s a much more interesting leadership proposition.
Considering a Chief Customer Officer appointment?
Douglas Jackson has tracked the senior Customer leadership market for many years, including appointments, backgrounds, salaries, sector movement and the changing shape of the CCO mandate.
If you’re considering creating, replacing or reshaping a Chief Customer Officer role, we can help you define what the organisation actually needs before you start looking for the person.
