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Four ways CIOs should help improve CX strategy

CIOs must take an active role in driving CX initiatives by getting closer to and better understanding customers, improving employee experience and using tech to meet CX needs.

Jim O'Donnell
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Published: 19 Nov 2025

IT and customer experience don't always see eye to enterprise eye, but CIOs should play a vital role in setting CX strategy.

Gartner analyst Michael Chiu detailed four specific ways that CIOs can positively influence CX during a session at the Gartner IT Symposium in October in Orlando.

CX has been important for as long as humans have conducted commerce, but it's often left out of the IT conversation today, Chiu said. CIOs may be primarily focused on technology, but it's a mistake not to be involved in CX because it's too important to ignore.

A Gartner survey of 125 CEOs and CFOs indicates that enhancing CX is their top growth strategy for the next three to five years, he said.

"As CIOs report to the CEO, doesn't it make sense that if the CEO's number one growth strategy is enhancing customer experience? You should dedicate a part of your work to the boss's number one priority," Chiu said.

The benefits of CIOs becoming more involved with CX in the organization usually outweigh the costs, he said. They can work on a mission-critical priority for the organization and, at the same time, improve their reputation and gain new job skills.

However, there are risks to consider. CIO's might be concerned that involvement with CX can distract from their core IT responsibilities, that their peers might be threatened by their CX involvement or that their CX efforts might ultimately fail.

While these are legitimate concerns, the benefits of involvement in CX outweigh the costs. Chiu laid out four specific ways that CIOs can influence CX, including the following:

  • Get closer to customers.
  • Remove employee barriers.
  • Help understand customers.
  • Show what tech can enable.

Get closer to customers

CIOs must get closer to customers if they want to influence CX, Chiu said. This should not be an academic exercise, but rather involve gaining direct customer experience. For example, the CIO or team members should act like a customer of their company, like becoming a mystery shopper in a retail store.

"Take your IT team through the customer journeys that you are forcing your customers to go through," he said. "If your organization has a new client onboarding experience take your IT team through that new client onboarding experience as if they are new clients."

CIOs can sit through the sales experience by letting the sales team pitch them as though they were a prospective client. Or they could have the IT team purchase the organization's products, use them and then contact the customer service center or help line.

"As you go through each of these experiences, write down the observations you have and the ideas for improvement," Chiu said.

CIOs should also get customers to tell their stories and invite them to speak at IT staff meetings. They should not only invite happy customers, but also those who are unhappy. This may make an IT staff uncomfortable, but there are greater opportunities to learn from angry customers than satisfied ones, he said.

CX is everyone's job, Chiu said, and there are nine specific questions about CX that every employee needs to answer, including the following:

  • Who are our customers?
  • What do we provide for our customers?
  • Who are our competitors or alternatives?
  • What's different about what we provide versus our competitors or alternatives?
  • What do our customers like about us?
  • What do our customers dislike about us?
  • How do customers become aware of us?
  • How and where can customers obtain our products?
  • How can customers obtain assistance when they have a question or require support?

Remove employee barriers

Customer experience and employee experience are closely related, so having an executive leadership team focused on removing employee barriers is the top driver of a CX program that meets customer needs, Chiu said.

Most organizations focus on improving the external customer experience but often overlook enhancing the internal employee experience for employees who interact with customers on a daily basis. This means that CIOs have an opportunity to contribute to CX by removing these internal employee barriers.

One way to do this is by using what Chiu termed the "3-2-1 method," which starts with identifying three CX strategic priorities. For each of these three priorities, identify two employee barriers that are preventing the realization of these objectives, then identify one tech-related business idea for each of these barriers.

For example, in retail, a CX strategic priority might be to improve the in-store experience. The two employee barriers preventing this could be the lack of real-time visibility and the difficulty employees have in finding products. One tech-related business idea might be to introduce a mobile technology inventory management app and product locator tool.

"[The 3-2-1 method is] a powerful way to apply technology to remove employee barriers and align tech teams more with customer experience objectives," Chiu said.

CIOs can also help remove employee barriers by connecting voice of the customer (VoC) with voice of the employee data, he said.

"If there's a problem with customer experience, there's usually a problem with employee experience," Chiu said. "But you need to connect the two to understand that relationship."

Help understand customers

Misunderstanding the customer is one of the biggest failures in CX, Chiu said. Everything in CX stems from a proper understanding of customers, but organizations often struggle with this.

There's a significant gap between what organizations say are important and the actual maturity of VoC initiatives, which Chiu called a "say-do gap." CIOs have a role to play in closing the say-do gap, but organizations are making a mistake in the attempt to better understand their customers.

Organizations try to collect all the data they can about customers and hope that their internal computing power enables them to analyze this data and make sense of that in understanding customer insights. But Chiu said that this is inefficient because they typically don't use the majority of that collected data.

Instead, CIOs should target the customer data to answer only a few questions that tell the most about their customers. For example, it's a good idea to gather board executives and executive leaders and ask each of them to provide five or six questions about customers that they don't have an answer to, but could drive better CX if they did have the answer.

The resulting list will include many questions, but CIOs should prioritize these questions and only pursue getting the answers to the top three, Chiu said. After this they should move to the next three, and so on.

Organizations have tried to understand their customers by "meeting them where they are," Chiu said, resulting in the opening of many channels for customer interaction. This is inefficient because the customer must choose the channel, and the data is diffused across channels.

Instead, organizations should build a simplified customer entry point called an intelligent front door (IFD) that sits above all the channels and welcomes customers, understands their intention and directs them to the best path of what they need, Chiu said.

"That IFD is right in the wheelhouse of what CIOs can contribute," he said. "It relies on technology, it helps your organization better understand customers and it simplifies the complexity of multiple channels."

Show what tech can enable

Finally, CIOs need to demonstrate what tech can do to support CX strategy. The first step is to set up a meeting with the head of CX to talk technology, Chiu said.

There are several questions to consider at this meeting, including the following:

  • What are the first and second biggest CX challenges, and how can tech help solve them?
  • Where should CX and IT collaborate more?
  • What's the CX strategy?
  • Which CX projects have tech needs?

CIOs should also be prepared to answer questions such as the following:

  • Which new tech should we use to improve CX?
  • How does IT prioritize CX-related requests?
  • Which projects are a priority for IT this year?

CIOs should also let CX leaders know about their technology plans for the upcoming years and map out how these will improve employee productivity and benefit CX.

CIOs vital to CX

It's imperative for organizations that CIOs take a leading role in CX strategy, Chiu said. However, there is a scale of how involved CIOs can work with CX, from the most involved to the least:

  1. Lead the enterprise-wide CX initiative, where the CIO is in charge of customer experience.
  2. Co-lead CX in partnership with a CX leader or CMO, which usually goes well beyond the CIOs own responsibilities.
  3. Drive the critical elements of a CX initiative, where the CIO contributes but does not lead the initiative.
  4. Sit on the CX steering committee, which is a place to start CIO involvement in a CX initiative.
  5. Remain aware but not actively involved with CX, which is the least desirable path for CIOs who want to improve CX.

Jim O'Donnell is a news director for Informa TechTarget, where he covers IT strategy and enterprise ESG.

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