What is a chief customer officer?

FOUNT’s Chief Experience Officer, Anne Eidelman, contributes the following insights to an article on the ChurnZero company blog. Read the full article.

Chief customer officer vs. chief experience officer

Some companies modify the title and responsibilities to better suit their needs. Anne Eidelman sets a good example. She’s the chief experience officer for FOUNT Global, Inc., a SaaS business focused on reducing work friction.

It’s not just the title that’s different, but the report structure. She has customer-facing teams reporting to her and that includes the product team. The company has determined, for their organization, that product experience goes hand-in-hand with the customer experience.

“Our company is helping to improve the experiences of employees because we’re working to reduce friction in their day-to-day work. For us, the word ‘experience’ has a really important meaning.”

Anne Eidelman, Chief Experience Officer at FOUNT Global, Inc.

Even though her role is somewhat different, the motivation behind it is similar. SaaS companies that want to grow “have to really pay attention” to their customer base. That requires having a single executive responsible for pulling together insights from the different teams to get a broad perspective of customers’ needs.

“At that top level, I’m making sure that we are coherent around what we are trying to solve for our customers and what kind of experience we’re trying to provide.”

There’s also an implicit message to customers in her title. What the company’s leadership is trying to do with a chief experience officer is demonstrate “there’s a broader mandate across our customer-facing teams and frankly even more broadly to center on customers and their needs.”

It’s worth noting that Anne comes from a non-traditional background. She’s a trained scientist accustomed to using the scientific method for discovering the root cause of problems. She also served as the CEO of an education non-profit for several years before taking on this role.