Chief Customer Officer – The Most Critical Role in the AI-First Boardroom
Why every company needs a CCO to turn CX into a growth engine.
We are living in an AI-first, always-on economy. Customers don’t just buy products. They buy trust, belonging, and experiences that stick. Yet too many companies still treat the customer function as a cost center, an afterthought, or worse, a fire extinguisher only brought out when things go wrong. As a consumer, I’m still amazed at how difficult it can be just to find a company’s customer service contact information.
That’s why I’m suggesting every company needs a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) at the table. Not a glorified head of support, but a true growth executive who treats customer experience as the profit center it actually is.
Five Reasons Why Every Company Needs a Chief Customer Officer (CCO)
Profit Center vs. Cost Center
A call to the contact center isn’t an expense. It’s an opportunity. Every moment of friction or delight compounds into long-term value. Every touchpoint has potential: upsell, cross-sell, early renewal, promotion. Companies that cut support to save dollars rarely calculate the downstream cost of churn or the revenue upside of every touchpoint. CCOs flip that script by building customer lifetime value models that link retention, referrals, and repeat revenue directly back to the bottom line.
Forethought vs. Afterthought
A modern CCO doesn’t wait for complaints to pile up. They’re embedded in product design, marketing campaigns, and go-to-market strategy — ensuring promises made are promises kept. When the customer perspective is built in before launch, companies prevent crises instead of scrambling after them.
Loyalty vs. Satisfaction
Satisfaction is table stakes. Loyalty is the goal. Loyalty happens when a customer feels seen, supported, and understood — when they sense a brand is emotionally invested in their success. In that case, mistakes or delays are more easily forgiven. A CCO measures more than “Did we solve the problem?” They measure emotional equity, the connection that keeps a customer coming back even when competitors are cheaper or faster.
Customer Rescue vs. Customer Complaint
The old model: fix what’s broken.
The new model: rescue the relationship before it breaks.
CCOs design systems that flag at-risk customers early, reroute them with adaptive messaging, and resolve issues before they ever become public. This isn’t “customer service.” It’s customer rescue at scale.
Fandom vs. Also-Ran
The best brands don’t just satisfy; they create fandom. Think of the difference between customers who quietly buy your product and those who proudly wear your logo. CCOs are stewards of brand affinity — cultivating communities, amplifying voices, and transforming ordinary users into evangelists.
Purpose vs. Reason
A CCO ensures that the company’s purpose connects to customer values. Customers today demand more than a transaction. They want alignment with their goals, ideals, and aspirations. Purpose-driven leadership, translated through the customer lens, creates differentiation no competitor can easily copy. Customer love, trust, and empathy is the moat in the Age of AI.
What a Chief Customer Officer Owns
For clarity, allow me to place a modern lens on the functional ownership responsibilities of the modern CCO role vs the traditional “VP of Support” stereotype. A Chief Customer Officer owns:
- Voice of the Customer in the Boardroom: in the boardroom is really all that needs to be said.
- The Customer Tech Stack: CRM, CX AI tools, analytics, survey platforms, and social listening and service, workflow automation, and IVR phone system.
- Customer Success: In B2B, this cannot be overlooked. The CCOensures retention and account expansion, safeguarding the base of ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) while creating pathways for growth and improved net revenue retention (NRR).
- CX Operations & Service Delivery: from BPO management and front-line workforce planning to AI agent assist, quality programs, experience scoring (MoreScore.ai), and workflow automation.
- The Experience Budget: funding not just service, but proactive engagement, retention, and loyalty-building. In some organizations, this budget is shared with the CMO or CBO, which can also work.
- Cross-Functional Accountability: ensuring product, engineering, design, marketing, and operations align to the promises made to customers.
- Brand Affinity & Emotional Equity Metrics: new ways of quantifying how customers feel, not just what they do.
This is an executive role. A seat at the C-suite table. And when done right, one of the most powerful levers for sustainable growth.
The Inflection Point: AI + CX = Experience Manufacturing
We’ve arrived at an inflection point. Artificial intelligence is no longer optional in customer operations. It accelerates response times, automates workflows, and enables personalization at scale.
But here’s the deeper shift: when paired with a CCO mindset, AI transforms customer service into something bigger. It enables Experience Manufacturing: the ability to design, produce, and deliver experiences as reliably as products roll off a factory line.
In this model, service becomes a utility: always available, always adaptive, always human at the moments that matter most.
Emotional Equity, Brand Affinity, and MoreScore.ai
This is where the future is heading. Companies can no longer rely solely on Net Promoter Score (NPS) or CSAT. They need to quantify the invisible: how customers feel about them over time.
That’s why I’m building MoreScore.ai, a patent-pending system for measuring emotional equity and brand affinity. Because loyalty is earned in emotions, not transactions — and executives need a metric that reflects that truth.
The Free Agent Moment
On September 30, I played my last down as Chief Customer Officer at Noom. Together, we reinvented customer experience at scale: doubling coaching caseloads, cutting OPEX nearly in half, and deploying AI-enabled systems that redefined efficiency without losing empathy. I’m incredibly proud of the transformation and equally so of the team now in place leading the way. Noom has an incredible future, it’s simply no longer a part of mine.
I’m announcing today that I’m officially a free agent. In professional sports terms, you might say, “I’m one of the top CCOs on the market.” If your company is ready to stop treating customers as an afterthought, if you’re ready to turn experience into your greatest competitive advantage — a true moat — then let’s talk. My full resume is here: Jeremy Victor resume.
Because in the Age of AI, the difference between winning and fading is clear:
Those who manufacture experiences will own the future.
About Jeremy
Jeremy Victor is a Chief Customer Officer, futurist, and transformational COO with 30 years of experience leading companies through every major technology shift. He recently soft-launched his debut book, The More Effect: The Leadership Field Guide for an AI-First, Always-On World, now available in limited release. In the book, he introduces The MORE Effect framework—a human-first blueprint for leadership, modernization, and sustainable growth in the Age of AI.
Jeremy is also the host of the Business at the Speed of AI podcast and newsletter, where he explores the intersection of customer experience, operational excellence, and the always-on economy. His mission is to help people—and the systems they work in—Become More by turning customer experience into a growth engine and emotional equity into brand affinity.
Join Jeremy online:
Substack Business at the Speed of AI, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok, OneMORE Minute.