Customer Experience Manager Salary Guide: Updated for 2023
How much does a customer experience manager make?
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 you make sure 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 in four countries.
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.
What does a Customer Experience Manager do?
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 care tasks such as front desk work, account management, or answering customer 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 metrics using CRM tools
- Implementing change that anticipates and addresses customer questions, needs, and complaints
- Segmenting customers and audiences into meaningful groups
- Leading customer support teams
The Customer Experience Career Path
The career trajectory in the CX field isn’t always a straight line. 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.
Furthermore, different companies also have various ways of defining their customer experience manager jobs.
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.
Listed below are several related titles and their descriptions.
- 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 a 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 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 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 consultants: Consultants 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 contractors, rather than full-time employees like directors. They may also work cross-functionally with other departments like marketing or operations. Consultants will generally 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.
- Chief experience officer (CXO): A relatively new addition to the C-suite, CXOs are responsible for all company-to-customer interactions. This is a high-level, strategic role that is primarily occupied with building a culture of customer centricity throughout the organization.
Customer Experience Manager Salary
Okay, time for the numbers. Keep in mind that customer experience manager salary averages depend on the current data available. Furthermore, the salaries offered within each organization can vary according to the skills, experience, certifications, and formal education the candidate brings to the role. In other words, these are just averages—take them with a grain of salt!
How We Calculated the Numbers
Averages by job title were sourced from Glassdoor. The data focuses on salary estimates for the job title in the USA, the UK, Canada, and Australia.
Average salaries
United States: $68,811 ($44K - $110K)
UK: £36,008 (£20K - £79K)
Canada: CAD $63,959 ($40K - $109K)
Australia: AUS $90,000 ($62K - $170K)
According to Glassdoor and Payscale, the salary range for customer experience managers in the the United States is between approximately $45k and $110k. However, Salary.com reports that the average customer experience manager salary is around $110,444. Despite the disparity in averages between the three sources, you can get a sense of how vast the pay range is for roles like this.
Keep in mind that the high concentration of CX manager jobs in high cost of living areas (such as New York City and Silicon Valley) skews the salary data a little higher than jobs in the rest of the country are likely to pay. If we look at the salary range in terms of percentiles:
- The lowest-paid 10th percentile earns less than $72,000
- The 25th percentile earns $90,753
- The 75th percentile earns around $135,021.
- And in the 90th percentile, some customer experience managers are earning upwards of $157,398 per year!
Why the Wide Range?
Customer experience management also has a different face in every industry. Jobs on the lower end of the payscale tend to be in-store roles in retail stores, whereas jobs on the high end of the spectrum are typically in technical fields such as SaaS or healthcare products and services.
Average Salaries for Other Customer Experience Roles
Here’s a breakdown of each average salary and salary range, listed by country. This data was also sourced from Glassdoor.
Customer experience associate salary
United States: $42,526 ($32K - $58K)
UK: £25,928 (£17K - £60K)
Canada: CAD $45,512 ($32K - $151K)
Australia: AUS $57,670 ($50K - $70K)
Salary ranges for customer experience associates reflect the entry-level nature of this role.
Customer experience specialist salary
United States: $43,999 ($31K - $64K)
UK: £29,216 (£19K - £52K)
Canada: CAD $49,025 ($33K - $94K)
Australia: AUS $64,162 ($55K - $103K)
While the associate position is typically the entry-level job title in the CX management career path, prior customer care experience or other related training may help entry-level candidates score a job at the specialist level. Some companies do not have associate-level roles in their CX departments, in which case, the specialist represents the entry-level position.
Customer experience analyst salary
United States: $69,011 ($46K - $103K)
UK: £26,463 (£16K - £48K)
Canada: CAD $46,721 ($29K - $75K)
Australia: AUS $80,000 ($70K - $90K)
Analysts tend to be more educated and specialized than other CX positions, leading to a higher overall average annual salary. Unlike specialists and associates, which generally don’t require a degree, analysts generally hold a bachelor’s degree or higher in statistics or a related discipline.
Experience manager salary
United States: $68,312 ($43K - $111K)
UK: £44,184 (£30K - £66K)
Canada: CAD $79,270 ($50K - $125K)
Australia: AUS $109,000 ($70K - $132K)
As this position is slightly more nebulous in terms of responsibilities and role, the average experience manager salary represents a large range between the high and low ends.
Member experience manager salary
United States: $65,644 ($42K - $103K)
UK: £30,349 (£19K - £48K)
Canada: CAD $61,044 ($35K - $105K)
Australia: AUS $119K ($93K - 145K)
The averages for member experience managers are based on less data than the other positions on this list, and as such may not be as accurate.
Digital experience manager salary
United States: $94,873 ($60K - $151K)
UK: £53,542 (£36K - £82K)
Canada: CAD $76,215 ($46K - $133K)
Australia: AUS $177,257 ($102K - $200K)
While this average digital experience manager salary is also based on limited data, the higher average tracks with a more specialized and experienced position.
Customer experience consultant salary
United States: $84,502 ($52K - $140K)
UK: £28,530 (£14K - £74K)
Canada: CAD $41,919 ($29K - $60K)
Australia: AUS $59,894 ($55K - $95K)
While consultants tend to be more experienced, the “freelance” nature of their work combined with a lack of salary data may contribute to this low-by-comparison average. In our opinion, consultants make a much higher salary in reality, and consulting may or may not be their primary stream of income.
Customer experience director salary
United States: $103,314 ($63K - $172K)
UK: £127,603 (£78K - £221K)
Canada: CAD $169,144 ($105K - $276K)
Australia: AUS $255,000 ($220K - $375K)
This is the second-most experienced position on this list and as such is in the highest range for average salary. These numbers are based on a larger data set and should be fairly accurate with respect to the current job market.
Customer experience officer (CXO) salary
United States: $300,853 ($174K - $551K)
UK: £127,603 (£46K - £241K)
Canada*: $193,731 ($132K - $242K)
Australia: AUS $220,000 ($155K - $270K)
This is the top position on this list, with salary ranges to match! As a note, Canadian payscale data for this position was sourced from SalaryExpert.com.
Stay Informed on Customer Experience Manager Salary Information
As customer experience is always changing and growing, this customer experience management salary information could quickly become outdated!
Consult the customer experience manager salary information here as you make career decisions in 2023, and subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date with the latest salary information and other trends for CX professionals.