Customer experience quality in the U.S. just hit a four-year low. According to Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, 25% of evaluated brands saw statistically significant CX declines compared to just 7% that improved.
This is an operations problem. And the executive best positioned to address it is the COO.
Here’s why:
CX is shaped far more by operational execution than it is by brand messaging or campaign strategy.
It depends on how processes flow, how quickly issues get resolved, and whether the technology supporting those processes is configured with those customers in mind. When CX degrades, the root cause typically traces back to fragmented systems, misaligned workflows, or technology decisions made without the customer in mind.
Improving agentic and generative AI capabilities and reducing costs are both urgent priorities for CX in 2026-2027, according to CMP’s Executive Priorities analysis. These cross-functional priorities touch procurement, process design, vendor management, and technology deployment—all domains that ultimately converge at the COO level
The COO sits at the intersection of all of these. In the face of waning CX quality, that intersection matters more than ever.
Intentions vs. Reality: The Widening Gap in CX
Recent research suggests a striking disconnect between what executives believe they’re delivering and what customers actually experience. Take PwC’s Customer Experience Survey, for example, which found that seven in ten executives feel their organization can’t keep pace with rising customer expectations. Even though about 90% of executives report that loyalty has increased in recent years, fewer than half of consumers see it that way.
Forrester’s analysts highlight several forces behind the slide. Declining employee engagement, for one. A fading commitment to putting customers first, alongside AI and other technology rollouts that have failed to deliver on their promise.
Companies aren’t ignoring these priorities, but they’re solving for the wrong layer of the problem. They’re investing in new technology, but those investments aren’t translating into better customer outcomes.
This gap is also about incentives. Most COOs are measured on cost, AHT, throughput, and margin. When the scorecard rewards efficiency over emotional value, CX degradation is the system working exactly as designed.
The breakdown shows up in the handoffs between departments. You’ll see it in the disconnect between what a platform can do and how it’s actually configured, and in the distance between a technology purchase and a measurable improvement in how customers are served. Behind all of that is a more fundamental misalignment:
The metrics driving operational decisions don’t reflect what customers actually care about.
Why the COO Is the Right Executive to Address This Problem
A common organizational response to declining CX is to create a dedicated role—a Chief Experience Officer or VP of Customer Experience—to own the problem. But ownership without execution authority is a recipe for frustration. Often, CX leaders wind up spending more time lobbying other departments to prioritize experience than actually making operational changes.
The COO, by contrast, already owns the operational levers that determine CX quality. They control process design, they influence technology procurement and deployment, they oversee the teams and workflows that deliver the actual customer experience. When there’s a gap between what a brand promises and what its operations deliver, the COO is the executive who can close it. At 67% of companies, CX technology purchasing decisions are not the sole responsibility of the CX/Customer contact executive, according to CMP.
The role itself is evolving to reflect this. Today’s COO is increasingly expected to be as comfortable evaluating technology architecture as they are optimizing a supply chain. In many organizations, the boundaries between COO, CIO, and CTO are blurring, producing a new kind of hybrid leader who can connect high-level business strategy with the technical decisions that determine how customers are actually served.
For companies relying on outsourced business processes—contact centers, document management, data entry, quality assurance—these tensions play out in very specific ways. For example, an IVR system tuned for maximum containment might hit its efficiency targets while quietly driving brand damage through customer frustration. Another example: SLAs built around speed and volume can look healthy on a dashboard while the actual experience—what some in the industry are calling experience-level agreements (XLAs)—deteriorates.
Then there is the fragmented knowledge base that forces agents to toggle between systems mid-call, dragging out handle time and eroding first-contact resolution. Not to mention the classic tradeoff between FCR and cost per contact, which often creates a false choice: optimize for one and the other suffers, because the underlying process was never designed to serve both.
The COO is the executive positioned to see across these tradeoffs. It’s the COO that ought to insist that third-party operations aren’t just managed for throughput, but configured to support the experience the brand is promising.”
Where Technology Decisions and Customer Outcomes Diverge (And How to Realign Them)
The root of most CX failures is a misalignment between technology strategy and customer experience strategy. Organizations adopt tools for efficiency or cost reduction without fully considering the downstream impact on the people those tools are meant to serve.
AI implementation is a good example that’s more nuanced than most CX commentary acknowledges. COOs are automating because they have to. Wage pressure, agent attrition, and high contact volumes have something to do with it. Boards want efficiency gains, and AI delivers them.
So, how to automate without degrading emotional value?
PwC’s survey found that 58% of consumers describe themselves as only somewhat comfortable—or not comfortable at all—using AI tools to interact with brands. About half said basic tasks like order tracking were where they most wanted AI involved.
Whereas the economics demand automation, the customer data says proceed carefully. A CX-aligned COO navigates that tension rather than defaulting to one side of it. That is: deploying AI where it genuinely reduces customer effort while protecting the human interactions that build trust and loyalty.
Yet companies continue to push AI-driven automation into contexts where customers would clearly prefer human interaction. In many cases, the drive to automate is fueled more by internal efficiency goals than by anything customers have asked for. The result is a growing mismatch between what gets automated and what people actually want from a brand.
KPMG’s Global Customer Experience Excellence research finds that leading organizations are shifting from reactive service models to anticipating customer needs before they arise. Their data suggests a clear link between how effortless an experience feels and how strongly customers advocate for the brand afterward. The keyword here is “effortless.” Technology should make the customer’s experience easier.
For COOs, realigning tech strategy with CX strategy means asking different questions before every technology decision:
- Will this make the customer’s experience measurably better?
- Will it reduce friction in ways the customer will notice?
- Are we solving for the customer’s pain point, or just our own?
These aren’t questions for the COO to answer alone. They require partnership with the CIO or CTO. But the COO is the executive most likely to insist they get asked in the first place. Because they’re closest to the operational impact
Operationalizing CX: What It Looks Like in Practice
Turning the COO into a CX champion requires a reframing of existing responsibilities. Every operational decision already affects CX. Are you considering that impact intentionally? That is, do those decisions actually reflect customer outcomes?
One concrete starting point: stack-ranking operational KPIs so that experience metrics carry real weight alongside efficiency metrics. In most contact center environments, AHT and cost per contact sit at the top of the scorecard. CSAT and CES are tracked but rarely carry the same consequences.
A CX-aligned COO reweights that hierarchy by creating a blended score that ties incentives to both operational performance and customer outcome. When CSAT and CES influence compensation, staffing decisions, and vendor evaluations the same way AHT does, the entire operation starts optimizing differently.
This also means evaluating outsourcing partners not just on cost and throughput, but on how their processes affect end-customer satisfaction. It means selecting technology platforms with integration and customer data visibility as primary criteria. And it means building feedback loops between front-line operations and CX metrics so that the team responsible for delivery has real-time insight into how their work actually lands..
The Research Is Clear
Organizations that consistently deliver on the experience their customers expect see better retention, loyalty, and revenue growth.
But closing the gap between what’s promised and what’s delivered requires someone who controls the machinery of delivery itself. The COO is that person. For organizations whose CX quality is trending in the wrong direction. Elevating the COO’s role in CX strategy may be the highest-leverage move available.
The Bottom Line
At DATAMARK, we work with COOs and operations leaders who are rethinking how outsourced business processes connect to customer outcomes. They’re doing it through tighter alignment between the technology already in place and the experience customers actually have. If that gap is something your organization is working to close, let’s talk.
