Growth is the definitive priority for today’s C-suite — 62% of CEOs now rank it as their #1 focus, the highest level in a decade. Customer experience? It ranks eighth, and only surfaces in conversation when someone asks directly.
Based on interviews with 34 senior executives across B2B, B2C, and B2B2C companies, this brief uncovers why CX so often gets sidelined — not because leaders don’t care about customers, but because CX hasn’t been translated into the language executives actually use to run the business: revenue, retention, and behavioral signals they can track and trust.
The research surfaces three findings — growth’s dominance as the defining priority, executives’ preference for behavioral over sentiment metrics, and the scarcity of reliable leading indicators — and shows how a few companies are closing the gap by building “Growth Chains” that connect operational levers to customer emotion, behavior, and dollars.
The CX Disconnect is the first read in HoC’s Growth Chain Library, written for CEOs and CX leaders ready to reposition customer experience as a growth function.
