New CIO? Your CX stack will tell you everything

There's a reason the first 90 days in a new CIO or CTO role get so much attention. With the average CIO tenure now just 4.7 years, this window is critical for shaping influence, building trust, and setting the trajectory for everything that follows.

The temptation is to dive into architecture diagrams, audit the security posture, or start rationalizing the application portfolio.

But the most revealing move you can make in those early weeks has nothing to do with admin access.

Become your own customer.

Call your support line. File a ticket. Try to return something. Ask a question through chat and see what happens.

As one CTO put it in recent Forrester research:

"The first thing I did was call into the IVR. I downloaded the app and logged into the portal to try to pay a bill. It was an eye-opening experience."

What you discover will tell you more about your company's technology priorities, and their impact on revenue and retention, than any dashboard ever could.

The outsider advantage

Being new gives you something rare: perspective.

You haven't normalized the friction. You aren't attached to the decisions that shaped the current state. You can experience your company the way your customers do, without filters, excuses, or institutional blind spots.

And because every company is now a technology company, customers are interacting with systems you will oversee, directly or indirectly. The support experience is where those systems become most revealing.

Where the truth shows up

Customer service is where the seams show.

It's the intersection of your data infrastructure, your process design, and your organizational priorities. When a customer reaches out, your systems either know who they are or they don't. The agent or AI either has context or they're starting from scratch. The experience either builds trust or erodes it.

This is where you learn whether your company treats service as a cost to minimize or a relationship to invest in. Whether your tech stack is architected around transactions or around people.

You'll also uncover friction your teams have normalized: the workarounds, the swivel-chairing between systems, the "that's just how it works" explanations that signal opportunity.

Don't confuse symptoms with causes

When you see what's broken, the instinct is to fix what's visible: the IVR, the chatbot, the interface.

But as one SVP learned, jumping straight into firefighting can crowd out the strategic work leadership expects. The urgent displaces the important.

The service experience is a diagnostic. It reveals whether your organization has the data architecture to understand customers across touchpoints. Whether your systems enable continuity or force people to repeat themselves. Whether CX and EX functions operate as partners or in silos.

Redefining success

Research consistently shows that technology leaders shouldn't rely solely on operational IT metrics to define success. Partnering with CX and EX teams, and even visiting frontline locations, provides critical insight into how technology impacts real experiences.

These moments clarify where IT is enabling business outcomes and where it's quietly getting in the way.

The question worth asking

As you map your first 90 days, add this to your list:

What does our customer experience reveal about our technology priorities?

If the answer is fragmented data, disconnected channels, and teams scrambling for context, you're looking at an architecture problem. One that touches revenue, retention, and the long-term value your company creates.

The best technology leaders know that efficiency and customer value are both required. Your service stack will tell you whether your organization has figured that out, or whether that's the work ahead.