Meet the new chief customer officers at Old Navy, Reach, Lytx and more
This is the latest in a quarterly look at executive appointments by companies with the intention of putting a greater emphasis on customer experience design. These are your new peers, industry influencers, potential mentors or perhaps clients one day.
Old Navy, one of North America’s most recognizable apparel brands and a division of Gap Inc., has appointed Michael Francis as chief customer officer, while simultaneously taking on the role of Head of Marketing Shared Services for the broader Gap Inc. portfolio.
Francis (pictured above) previously served as president of JCPenney, chief marketing officer at Target, and chief global brand officer at DreamWorks Animation. He had also been advising Old Navy prior to accepting the permanent role. He will report to Haio Barbeito, president and CEO of Old Navy, and will be focused on sharpening brand storytelling, deepening customer engagement, and strengthening customer experience across all touchpoints.
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Reach, the U.K. publisher behind titles including the Mirror, Express, Daily Star, and dozens of regional news brands, has promoted George Grist into a revived chief customer officer role under new CEO Piers North.
The role comes with a newly created Customer division that consolidates teams from editorial, commercial and operations with a mandate to grow and diversify revenue. This spans print and digital subscriptions, e-commerce and affiliate revenue, and the company’s New York-based U.S. business.
Grist, who joined Reach in 2022 as deputy chief operating officer, led the company’s push into digital subscriptions and completed a six-month stint as interim managing director in the U.S., overseeing the launch of Mirror.com.
Before Reach, Grist held strategy and transformation roles at Condé Nast and Boston Consulting Group, with earlier career stints at the BBC in digital strategy and as a policy advisor at the Department for Education.
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Lytx, a provider of video telematics and safety solutions for commercial fleets, has promoted Dave Riordan to chief customer officer.
In the role, Riordan will oversee client experience across all of Lytx’s customers, working closely with enterprise clients to share and implement best practices, and employing what the company describes as a consultative approach to help clients design and execute their video telematics programs. He joined Lytx in 2009 and has since managed its most strategic accounts. The company said he has driven year-over-year improvements in safety and efficiency outcomes for customers.
Riordan previously worked as an entrepreneur in the business telecommunications sector and as a strategy consultant with Mercer Management Consulting in San Francisco. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Yale University.
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AdvancedMD, a provider of cloud-based software for independent medical practices, has appointed Brandon Russell as chief customer officer, a role where he will oversee the company’s customer success operations including support, implementation, and customer success and adoption teams.
The company said Russell’s key priorities will include reducing the time it takes new customers to realize value from their technology investments. AdvancedMD provides electronic health records, practice management and patient engagement tools to more than 65,000 practitioners across 13,000 independent practices.
Russell comes to AdvancedMD from NetDocuments, where he served as senior vice president of customer success. He has held customer success leadership roles at Ivanti and NiCE as well, and brings more than 15 years of customer service experience to the role. He reports to CEO Amanda Sharp.
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Dstny Group, a Brussels-headquartered European provider of business communications solutions, has named Igor Pais as chief customer officer and a member of its executive team.
Pais will align marketing, sales, services, and customer success around shared customer goals, with a focus on accelerating time to value, strengthening retention, and building conditions for sustainable growth. He will report directly to CEO Daan De Wever.
The company, which supports more than five million users and over 200 service provider partners across eight countries, said the appointment reflects its commitment to ensuring the quality of the customer experience scales alongside the business itself.
Pais brings 20 years of experience in the communications software industry, with a career spanning network, service, and subscriber domains. He has previously led major transformation programmes focused on new revenue streams, product ROI, and measurable business outcomes.
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GoldenSource, a financial data management platform for capital markets, has created a brand-new chief customer officer role and filled it with Jesper Cordes, a veteran of the financial technology sector.
Cordes will lead GoldenSource’s global account management and customer success functions, helping clients extract greater value from the company’s platform as financial institutions grapple with rising data complexity across investment operations, trading, risk, and regulatory reporting.
The creation of the CCO role reflects what GoldenSource describes as a broader need in enterprise fintech for strategic vendor partnership, not just technology delivery. Chief Commercial Officer Marc Mallett noted that clients increasingly need a partner who understands their operating reality and can deliver measurable outcomes.
Cordes brings more than 25 years of experience in client-facing financial technology leadership. Most recently, he served as managing director, client services at Enfusion (now part of Clearwater Analytics), and before that spent 25 years at SimCorp, where he built and led the North American customer organization from the ground up.
