Responsibility without a mandate: customer experience is owned by many, but driven by few

You have a CX manager. Maybe even an entire department. But ask yourselves: can that person actually force through a change in a department that does not report to the CX manager? If the answer is no, you do not have an owner of the customer experience. You have a volunteer.

Loyalty Group’s CX Maturity Study 2026 shows that 60% of the 203 CX managers in the study have overall responsibility for day-to-day CX work, and half hold a dedicated CX role. On paper, it looks organised. But only 49% have budget responsibility, and in practice the role is often advisory or coordinating rather than directly steering. The responsibility has been assigned. The power has not.

Responsibility has been assigned. Power has not

That is a crucial difference. A title is not the same as the power to make decisions. A person with responsibility but no power can point out problems, but cannot fix them. Responsibility is formally assigned as a task, but rarely with the mandate needed to drive change across the organisation.

The same pattern appears in Medallias 2026 State of Customer Experience Report: 43% of companies globally lack a single decision-maker responsible for CX priorities and budget, and 58% find that their CX initiatives depend on budgets the CX function does not control. This is exactly the same gap between responsibility and power that our own figures show.

The mandate follows responsibility at individual level. But that does not explain maturity

There is a clear pattern in the data: 74% of those with people management responsibility also have budget responsibility, compared with only 14% of the rest. So the mandate exists where the responsibility exists – at least at individual level. That sounds like a solution: give the individual CX manager a budget, and the matter is settled.

But that is not what really sets mature companies apart from the rest. What matters is not whether responsibility has been delegated downwards with a budget attached. What matters is whether top management takes ownership itself. A skilled head of CX with their own budget can still end up standing alone if the executive team has nothing at stake itself.

Broad ownership strengthens customer focus and creates silos at the same time

Half of the respondents work in dedicated CX roles, but there is also significant representation from marketing, customer service, sales and business development. In many ways, this is healthy: customer focus needs to live in more places than a single department.

But the same spread is the root of what most CX managers themselves identify as their biggest challenge: organisational silos. When responsibility is spread across four or five functions, each with its own goals, budget and management, it becomes difficult to unite efforts around one customer experience. The picture many will recognise is the skilled and dedicated CX employee fighting hard for the customer. But without formal authority, that person cannot force through changes in departments with their own priorities.

The path to the executive team has become longer, not shorter

Today, only 26% of CX managers report directly to the CEO or the board. In our equivalent study from 2021, the figure was 48%. In five years, the share with direct access to the top level has almost halved.

This can be interpreted in two ways. One is positive: CX has increasingly moved into the organisation’s day-to-day operations instead of sitting as an isolated function. The other is a warning: in fewer cases is the customer experience connected to the level where the major priorities are actually set. Leadership commitment is the strongest single driver of CX maturity in the entire dataset. As the path to the executive table grows longer, the customer experience also becomes easier to cut when budgets have to be defended.

The trend in our study is not an isolated one. Internationally, Gartner points out that the companies that perform best in the market are almost four times as likely to have a dedicated CX team led by a C-level executive. The distance to the executive table is therefore not a detail. It is one of the strongest known differences between companies that win on customer experience and those that do not.

Maturity is about structure, not size

You might think that large, complex organisations find it harder to establish clear CX ownership than smaller companies. The data says otherwise. Across company sizes, maturity is almost flat. Around half of the respondents come from companies with more than 1,000 employees, and they perform neither significantly better nor worse than the smaller ones.

This is an encouraging finding for any executive team thinking, “We are too big – or too small – to solve this.” You are not. Scale does not determine whether the customer experience has a real owner. The structure around it does.

When everyone owns it, no one does

This is where the consequence becomes concrete. When the customer experience is owned by many and driven by few, it becomes everyone’s responsibility – and therefore no one’s. The customer experience is rarely cut in a round of savings because it is unnecessary. It is cut because it has no clear owner on the executive team who can defend it against everything else competing for attention and budget. For a CEO, this is a strategic risk: no single area of responsibility can be held accountable for whether the customer experience supports growth. For a CCO, it means that commercial decisions with a direct impact on the customer experience – pricing strategy, opening hours, product prioritisation – are often made without anyone in the room who formally represents the customer’s perspective.

The question for the executive team

The next time customer experience is on the agenda, it is worth asking one simple, concrete question: if your CX manager and your sales director fundamentally disagree on a priority for next quarter, who wins – and why? If you cannot answer that clearly and quickly, the lack of an answer is itself a sign that someone has been given responsibility for the customer experience, but not the authority to act on it. And as this study shows again and again, that is the difference that ultimately determines whether your organisation ends up among the few mature companies or in the broad middle.