By Breanna Moreno, CX Architect at Wyllo
I’ve spent a lot of time lately reflecting on the conversations I’ve had at industry events, partnerships with tech founders, and late-night chats with fellow CX leaders, over the last several years. My hope, here, is not to generate negativity or throw shade. It’s to encourage change.
There is a recurring theme, an elephant in the room that we all see, yet few in executive leadership positions want to acknowledge: the systematic minimization of Customer Support teams and their leadership.
Why the Heart of Your Brand is Still Missing a Seat at the Table
Over the last few years, Customer Experience (CX) has become the industry’s favorite buzzword. I proudly consider that I’ve had a small part in making this shift possible; I am not ashamed to say I am deeply proud of that work. Yet, despite being the heart and soul of the brand, CX leaders are still rarely offered a seat at the table. We remain on a siloed island, watching others promote and scale while we hold the foundation together with grit and institutional knowledge.
The “Tourist” in the Support Queue vs. a CX Leader Seat at the Table
We’ve all seen it. A CEO or a Founder spends four hours in the support queue, answers a few tickets, and posts a triumphant LinkedIn update about how they “stayed close to the customer.”
To be blunt: it’s a slap in the face. Taking a phone call for an afternoon is not “doing the job.” It doesn’t capture the grueling hours, holidays, nights, weekends, or the tremendous psychological strain of being the company’s emotional sponge every single day. When an executive “plays” support for a day, they get to pat themselves on the back and retreat to their office. But the agents who show up every day, who absorb the anger, the frustration, and the technical failures of a product they didn’t build, don’t get to retreat. They stay. They often innovate, they advocate and they continue to show up facing challenges. They keep going because they actually care.
There is a profound irony in an executive acting like they understand the well being of the customer while simultaneously denying a seat at the table to the person who actually protects it.
CX Leader Seat at the Table: Why It’s Deserved
The Hardest Job in the Building
Customer Support is often dismissed as an entry level function, paid the lowest, and almost never invested in. The reality? It is the hardest job in the organization. Support agents are expected to be walking encyclopedias of the company’s failures and successes. CX leaders oversee a team and often felt left out or forgotten about, yet CX leaders build culture, and they build strong teams. They are self starters and doers of hard work, protecting the very teams they exhaust themselves advocating for. They are held to the highest standards of productivity, yet they are the ones forced to find solutions to challenges they didn’t create, fixing systems they didn’t design and apologizing for marketing promises they didn’t make.
“We pride ourselves on walking a tight-rope between the customer and the company. We say what no one wants to hear, and we challenge the status quo. But because that isn’t always tied to a tangible EBITDA metric, it’s often undervalued.”
The AI Delusion: Efficiency vs. Replacement
We cannot talk about the status quo without addressing the latest silver bullet taking over boardrooms: artificial intelligence. C-suites are currently enamored with the idea that AI agents and chatbots are the solution to everything. We are seeing teams shrink in the name of “automation” while, ironically, operational costs often drive upward due to complex implementations and lost customers.
Let me be super clear: I am a huge supporter of AI. I want to leverage it to make our teams more impactful. It is a brilliant tool for handling costly challenges like 24/7 coverage, basic triaging and expensive phone support. But AI is a tool to make us better, not a mandate to replace us.
If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that humans need humans. We still want to connect and feel heard. You can’t automate empathy, and you certainly can’t automate the deep, nuanced problem solving of a seasoned human. When a C-suite thinks they can “AI their way” out of a human team, they aren’t just cutting costs, they are cutting the cord to their customer base.
Wyllo’s position on this is direct: Customer Experience is the connective tissue between a brand and its customers, and the CX leader is the person closest to where intent, risk, and trust actually intersect. The reason Wyllo’s CX Support is core to its offering, not an afterthought, is exactly this: the people most affected by fraud signals, abuse patterns, and policy decisions are the same people farthest from the decisioning tools that shape those outcomes. Closing that gap is structural work, not symbolic. It’s what we mean when we say “CX-first risk intelligence platform” and why we keep showing up in rooms where CX leaders are the ones holding the microphone.
Institutional Memory vs. C-Suite Ego
Often, CX leaders have been with the brand since the beginning. We know the culture, the history, and the “why” behind every product pivot. Sometimes, I think the C-suite is intimidated by that depth of knowledge. When they try to “level set” leadership structures, Support is often thrown under Marketing or Operations, siloed and forgotten until a crisis occurs.
We train the leaders who come into these organizations, only to stay stagnant while they move up. We might be thrown a new title, but the compensation and authority rarely follow. It feels like a “clique” that we just don’t quite get invited to join.
CX Leader Seat at the Table: The Future
A Call for a Real Shift: Building Better, Together
Now, as a person that is constantly motivated by seeing the glass half full, motivated by a solution-oriented mindset, I know we can build better, together. While it may be mind boggling that the people with the most influence over the actual user experience have the least influence over company strategy. And, while we are the first ones to get a call on our personal cell phones when a minuscule situation goes wrong, yet the last to be praised for the thousands of resolutions we manage daily. My hope is we can all work collectively to encourage a shift.
To the founders and CEOs of startups: it’s time to change the status quo. We are all capable of shifting this narrative to unify our organizations and build something better, together.
- If you want to understand support, start by listening to the person leading the department.
- Stop siloing CX. Give your CX leader a direct line to the top. They are your primary retention engine and your best source of product data.
- Leverage AI to empower humans, not erase them. Use technology to remove the mundane so your talented humans can do the meaningful work they were hired for.
Tech partners are recognizing our value; and I am ever-so grateful to their advocacy and support for so many CX leaders around the world. It’s time for the brands themselves to do the same. Empower these leaders and departments, before its too late. Acknowledge the value they bring to your brand and build the correlation to the direct impact against EBITDA. CX leaders don’t want to be a “nuisance.” We want to play our part in the growth and success of the companies we’ve helped build and make a meaningful impact. Let’s stop talking about “Customer Experience” as a buzzword and start treating it like the foundational heartbeat it actually is.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are CX leaders often excluded from executive leadership?
Three reasons, in my experience. First, executives often confuse a function with a department: they think “Customer Experience” is a job title, not the throughline through every team. Second, support work doesn’t tie cleanly to a single EBITDA metric, so it gets categorized as a cost center even when it’s a retention engine. Third, and uncomfortable but true: many leadership teams find it easier to talk about customer experience than to actually empower the person closest to it. The fix isn’t a new title. It’s a direct line to the top.
Is AI going to replace customer support teams?
No, and the executives who think it will are about to learn an expensive lesson. AI is excellent at the work nobody should be doing manually: triage, routing, 24/7 coverage, answering questions that have published answers. AI is bad at the work that defines customer relationships: nuanced problem-solving, judgment calls on policy exceptions, empathy in distress, and the institutional knowledge that comes from years of seeing how a business actually operates. Cutting headcount in the name of AI usually means cutting the cord to your customers. Use AI as augmentation, not amputation.
What’s the difference between an empowered CX leader and a “support manager”?
Authority. A support manager runs queues, hits SLA targets, and reports up through marketing or operations. An empowered CX leader influences product roadmap, has a voice in pricing and policy decisions, contributes to retention strategy, and reports to a C-suite seat that takes them seriously. Both can hold the same title. What distinguishes them is whether the rest of the executive team treats their judgment as load-bearing.
What does a CEO actually owe to their CX team?
At minimum, a real listening relationship with the CX leader. Not “I spent four hours in the queue” theater. Actual structured time, on a cadence, where the CX leader brings the patterns they’re seeing and the CEO acts on them. The CX team holds institutional knowledge that no analytics dashboard captures. A CEO who isn’t tapping that source is making strategy with their eyes half-closed.
How should CX report into the executive structure?
Direct to the CEO or COO, ideally as a Chief Customer Officer or equivalent C-level seat at scale. Reporting through marketing puts CX in service of acquisition over retention. Reporting through operations buries it in efficiency metrics. CX is fundamentally a strategic function with cross-functional reach, and it should report accordingly. If your company isn’t ready for a CXO seat, the next-best option is a VP of CX reporting directly to the CEO with budget authority and product input rights.
What metrics actually capture CX impact?
A combination, because no single number does. Net retention, repeat-purchase rate, customer lifetime value, post-resolution NPS, and the qualitative signals that predict each (sentiment trends in support tickets, friction points in journey analytics, themes in cancellation surveys). The dangerous mistake is evaluating CX solely on cost-per-ticket or first-response-time, which incentivizes the team to wrap conversations quickly instead of resolving the underlying issues. Those secondary metrics matter operationally but say nothing about customer-relationship value.
Why are seasoned customer support agents undervalued?
Because their value compounds invisibly. A seasoned agent resolves a complex case in twelve minutes that a new agent would escalate twice and still misjudge. They know the unwritten product history, the patterns that signal real abuse versus customer frustration, and the language that defuses conflict. None of that shows up on a dashboard. It shows up in customers who stay. Treating these agents as interchangeable headcount is one of the most expensive structural mistakes companies make.
What’s the cost of treating CX as a cost center?
Higher than most CFOs realize, because the cost shows up as the absence of revenue rather than as an expense line. Lost retention, lost word-of-mouth, lost lifetime value, lost institutional knowledge when burned-out agents leave. PwC’s 2024 Voice of the Consumer survey found only roughly 4 in 10 consumers will forgive a brand after a bad experience, even if it gets resolved. The cost of one well-handled difficult moment is small. The cost of one mishandled one compounds across the customer base for years.
