"User Experience is the Key to Growth"…The Growing Role of Startup Chief Experience Officers

Increase in Startups Creating Chief Experience Officer (CXO) Positions
Directly Linked to Success or Failure in Consumer Experience Business

The Chief Experience Officer (CXO) has emerged as a key role in the startup industry. Recently, more startups have been establishing the CXO position. The CXO is responsible for devising strategies to ensure customers have a better experience throughout every stage of using a product or service. This signifies that beyond developing innovative technologies and providing services, understanding the user experience and the efforts needed to improve it have become crucial for startup growth.

According to industry sources on the 20th, I’m Web, a shopping mall solution startup, recently recruited Peter Kim, a CXO from the global big tech company Shopify. I’m Web offers solutions that allow individuals or small brands to easily create websites and shopping malls without specialized knowledge such as development, Photoshop, or coding. Since its competitiveness lies in supporting easy yet diverse design modes to produce high-quality results, user experience is central to service improvement. In particular, I’m Web currently operates services in Taiwan and, recognizing growth potential in overseas markets, is preparing to enter North America. They explained that by hiring Peter Kim, a former head designer at Shopify, they are laying the foundation to create competitive services in the global market.

Jonathan Jung CXO

MyRealTrip, which is expanding its service area in the recently vibrant travel market, also recruited Jonathan Jung, a CXO from Google headquarters, to strengthen customer service experience. This move aims to lead change through enhancing customer experience in the travel market after the pandemic. In MyRealTrip’s strategy to evolve into a super app that integrates travel-related services for one-stop provision, the importance of user experience has increased. Jonathan Jung previously worked at Microsoft and served as design lead at Google headquarters, leading the launch of numerous services including Android and Google Play. A MyRealTrip official explained, "Since joining, Jonathan Jung CXO has been focusing on recommending various travel destinations and products to customers and lowering the entry barriers to new travel experiences to provide a broad range of experiences."

Ten years ago, the CXO title was unfamiliar even in global corporate environments. In 2011, the global future research organization Millennium Project predicted in its ‘UN Future Report 2025’ that by 2025, 14 years later, CXOs could be included among senior executives in companies. However, as the role of improving comprehensive service experiences with a ‘customer-centric’ approach became more important over the past decade, this timeline was accelerated. The adoption of this position has increased mainly among U.S. tech companies such as TripAdvisor and Airbnb, and domestically, tech companies in areas like portals, gaming, and commerce are also building organizations with CXO roles.

These companies introduce CXOs based on the judgment that user experience can directly affect the success or failure of products or services. For startups, accumulating user experience and reflecting it in service improvements is considered an important ‘scale-up’ strategy. An industry insider said, "The CXO role is expanding beyond global companies to startups. Understanding how users perceive startups and what services they expect is becoming key to scaling up."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.