Share with your CMO
The best CXOs, argues CMSWire contributor and CX consultant Jason Barger, are building toward their own irrelevance, not as an exit strategy but as proof the job worked. The central argument about CX organizational maturity is blunt: if Operations, Marketing, and HR only ask “how does this affect the customer?” because the CX team nudged them, the organization hasn’t distributed customer ownership, it has just centralized the reminder function. A CX department that gets excellent at documenting friction without eliminating it is running a very expensive symptom log.
What this means for your business
CMOs who measure CX team health by headcount, survey volume, or journey-map density are measuring the wrong thing. The diagnostic that actually matters is whether other functions ask the customer question unprompted. If your product team needs a CX ticket to notice confusing onboarding, or your ops team waits for a CSAT dip before revisiting a broken process, your CX function is a translation layer that shouldn’t need to exist in that form. The collision center example in the piece is instructive: staff answered the same insurance and logistics questions dozens of times a week, and the organization called that “voice of the customer data” rather than a process design failure.
The pattern Barger identifies has a reliable failure mode in mid-size enterprises. CX teams get rewarded for measurement sophistication, so they build better dashboards, richer journey maps, and more granular NPS segmentation. That work is visible, defensible in budget reviews, and genuinely useful at early organizational maturity. But it quietly trains the rest of the business to treat customer feedback as someone else’s input stream rather than their own operating constraint. The CX function becomes a buffer that absorbs friction rather than a force that eliminates it, and the buffer’s existence reduces the urgency for anyone else to act.
The falsification condition for this argument is real: some organizations are too fragmented for distributed customer ownership to work without a coordinating function, and in those cases a strong centralized CX team is the right first move, not a sign of immaturity. But for any CMO running a CX org that’s been around more than three years, the honest question isn’t whether the team is skilled, it’s whether the org has started asking the customer question on its own. If the answer is no, the CX investment has produced expertise without transfer, and that’s a strategy problem, not a budget one.
Based on reporting from The Best Chief Experience Officers Are Trying to Disappear, originally published 2026-07-17 12:26:00.
