2020 Customer Experience Manager Salary Guide

What’s a typical customer experience manager's salary?

This CX manager salary guide will cover junior, mid-level, and senior positions, and includes actionable information you can use when making your next career decision. It can also help ensure you’re being paid what you’re worth in your current position.

Our guide also includes descriptions of the CX manager role and related titles, customer experience manager salary information, and overall salary ranges by title.

Why Is This Important?

The customer experience (or CX) is an emerging and exciting field with new positions and niches cropping up regularly. And it’s becoming more important — while 82% of marketers think they are adequately addressing customer needs when it comes to customer experience, only 10% of customers “strongly agreed” that their needs were being met.

If it’s just piqued your interest and you’re looking into career options, or you’re already established and looking for an upgrade, you might be wondering about a typical customer experience manager salary. More and more organizations are recognizing the need for CX professionals, and are willing to pay more for relevant experience and skills.

What is a Customer Experience Manager?

The role of a customer experience manager (aka a CXM or CEM) is to proactively increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, through ensuring interactions meet customer needs and managing the customer life cycle.

The ultimate goal is creating an ongoing strategy for anticipating and meeting customer needs. CX managers often lead a team and provide an overarching strategy and vision for their team to follow. They often work closely with marketing managers to align goals and visions.

Customer Experience Roles and Responsibilities

Before we discuss the specific responsibilities of customer experience managers, we should first cover what a customer experience manager does not do. While there is some overlap between customer experience and customer service (and customer service professionals may be part of customer experience teams), their roles are distinct. Customer service roles such as front desk work, account management, or answering customer service queries are not part of a customer experience manager’s day-to-day.

CX managers develop and implement customer experience strategies, which can involve:

• Reviewing and pulling insights from analytics and data
• Implementing change that anticipates and addresses customer questions, needs, and complaints
• Segmenting customers and audiences into meaningful groups
• Leading customer support teams

Related Customer Experience Roles and Responsibilities

Different companies have various ways of defining customer experience manager roles.

For example, some companies may employ a customer experience journey manager, or a customer experience innovation manager, instead of a customer experience manager. These roles may be very similar to the latter, but with a more specific focus than a CX manager.

Within customer experience, job title variations tend to indicate specializations and areas of focus, even if the roles are similar. For example, customer experience managers may specialize in UX.

Listed below are several related titles and their descriptions.

• Customer experience specialist. A specialist’s role focuses more on the communications side of the customer experience. They are directly involved in reviewing customer feedback and planning improvements based on it. Their specialty is getting to the root of customer complaints and feedback and creating holistic solutions, as well as getting out in front of problems before the customer notices them. Specialists often have two or more years of experience.
• Customer experience associate. Associates have more direct contact with customers and often respond to queries. They carry out the strategy created by the customer experience manager and implement changes recommended by the specialist. They take care of issues they can resolve themselves, and bring more complicated ones to the manager. They are more junior and entry-level, but they could have up to two years of experience.
• Customer experience analyst. This one is a bit more obvious — analysts have a focus on analytics and data. Their role involves using insights from data to make improvements, maintain the feedback loop flow, and predict future needs and problems. The report findings to the customer experience manager and work with them to determine which insights are actionable and worth their time. Analysts tend to have three or more years of experience.
• Customer experience expert. Experts are at the top of their field and have lots of experience in different industries and sectors. While this is also true of directors, experts more often join organizations as consultants or freelancers, rather than full-time employees like directors. They may also consult other departments like marketing or operations. Experts will have 10 or more years of experience.
• Experience manager. Experience manager job descriptions are essentially the same as that of CX managers, but the organization may use different languages for their customers. For example, they may use client experience manager, consumer experience manager, user experience manager, or others. They may also use a combination of terminology, depending on their audience. An experienced manager can be a catchall to cover all an organization’s customers.
• Member experience manager. Member experience managers are focused on members rather than customers. This is specific to the company’s business model, and if this involves a member or subscription-based model, calling a CX manager a member experience manager creates consistency. Their responsibilities are the same as that of the customer experience manager.
• Digital experience manager. Digital experience managers are CX managers, but with a focus on how customers experience and interact with digital platforms such as the website and apps. They may work in tandem with other customer experience managers at their organizations to optimize digital experiences while taking into account analytics, customer queries, and complaints.
• Customer experience director. A customer experience director oversees the customer experience department and all teams. Not all organizations will have or require a customer experience director, but for those that do, the position includes creating a strategy around improving the customer experience and getting ahead of customer complaints and feedback. They will often delegate implementation to customer experience managers.

Customer Experience Manager Salary

Okay, time for the numbers. Keep in mind that customer experience manager salary averages depend on the data available, which in some cases is very little. This explains some noticeable anomalies in the numbers below. As mentioned above, companies define customer experience roles in different ways and may consider some positions more junior or senior than other organizations.

How We Calculated the Numbers

Averages by job title were sourced from Neuvoo. The data focuses on the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, and India. All salaries are listed in USD unless stated otherwise. When data for a specific country was unavailable, the country was not listed.

Customer experience manager

The starting customer experience manager salary is around $27,000 for junior employees. The average senior customer experience manager salary can get up to $92,000 USD or $132,500 CAD. Here’s the breakdown of each average by country.

Customer experience specialist

A junior customer experience specialist salary can start out around $25,350 and get up to $62,966 for more senior positions. The UK leads in average salary for this position by a wide margin — it’s possible that specialists are more senior positions in general in the UK than the other countries listed below.

Customer experience associate

Associates are lower in seniority in general than other positions, which explains the lower overall averages. Starting salaries can be as low as $18,988 and can get up to $50,134. Again, Australia leads the pack in terms of average salary. They may place more value on the title than the other countries on this list and require more experience.

Customer experience analyst

Analysts tend to be more educated and specialized than other CX positions, leading to a higher overall average salary. Junior salaries start at $18,525 and more senior positions can make up to $98,526. Australia leads the average salary for this position, likely due to its overall higher wages in comparison to the other countries on the list.

Customer experience expert

Experts tend to be more senior and experienced and can earn up to $49,750, according to the available data. A lack of data in the USA and UK may contribute to this low by comparison average. In our opinion, experts make a much higher salary in reality.

Experience manager

As this position is slightly more nebulous in terms of responsibilities and role, the salary can vary widely. In the US, junior experience managers can start at $23,400 and more senior positions can earn up to $89,250, which is a wide range. The USA again leads the average, potentially due to the wide range of roles that fit under this position and the population in the USA.

Member experience manager

This position can start at $28,000 and get up to $60,000. The averages below are based on less data than the other positions on this list, and as such may not be as accurate.

Digital experience manager

While this average digital experience manager salary is also based on limited data, the higher average tracks with a more specialized and experienced position. Entry-level salaries are around $38,805 and can reach $185,000 for the most senior positions.

Customer experience director

This is one of the most experienced positions on this list and as such is in the higher range for average salary. A customer experience director salary can reach up to $182,325. This number is based on more data than the digital experience manager salary and should be more accurate.

Originally published at https://thecxlead.com on April 21, 2020.