Director of Digital Customer Experience & AI Innovation

Verizon•Rolling Meadows, IL

3d•$161,000 - $280,000•Hybrid

About The Position

This is a business-critical leadership role that will impact business growth. The mission is to leverage design thinking, out-of-the-box innovation, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create a personalized, predictive, and proactive customer experience for SaaS users. The role will shift customer engagement strategy toward an AI-driven, tech-touch engine, exercising executive leadership to scale team capabilities. This transformation will empower customer-facing professionals to focus on high-value, complex interactions while protecting and expanding Net Revenue Retention (NRR). As a highly specialized hybrid leader and established Director-level people leader, this role blends End to End CX Strategy, digital journey design, and high-level business acumen to ensure every customer, regardless of size, receives a world-class experience.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree or four or more years of experience.
Highly experienced People leader with 8+ years in Customer Success, Sales, CX Strategy, Marketing Ops, or Digital CX, with at least 3 years in a leadership role within a SaaS environment.
Deep expertise building, auditing, and restructuring end-to-end customer journeys.
Certified or highly experienced in facilitating Design Thinking workshops to drive out-of-the-box innovation.
Proven ability to act as the ultimate business owner for customer-facing automation, navigating complex, cross-functional environments to secure alignment.
Expertise in designing automated customer-impacting workflows that feel highly personalized and intuitive, shifting away from human-dependent models to tech-touch platforms.
Strong data fluency and ability to translate data into CX strategy.
Proficiency in BI tools (Tableau/Looker), and Customer Success platforms (Gainsight/Staircase/ChurnZero).

Responsibilities

Facilitate and govern complex, cross-functional design thinking workshops with senior stakeholders to fundamentally restructure and optimize the end-to-end customer journey prior to automation.
Bring out-of-the-box, innovative approaches to legacy problems.
Diagnose systemic, root-cause workflow inefficiencies across the enterprise and design scalable, tech-enabled processes to eliminate the customer and employee "Effort Tax."
Translate overarching CX enterprise strategy ("Truth and Content") into rigorous, executable end-to-end customer journey maps that determine and orchestrate how multiple departments interact with the customer base.
Serve as the ultimate business authority for the end-to-end "Tech-Touch" customer journey, guiding the quantitative and qualitative analysis required to map the ideal state across all touchpoints.
Direct the CX strategy and business logic for the integration of Generative AI and LLMs into customer journeys.
Act as the CX business visionary, partnering with technical teams to ensure the AI chatbot experience resolves customer friction and maintains a premium brand tone.
Lead cross-functional resources to build and deploy proactive digital interventions and "Next Best Action" frameworks that scale product adoption, enabling seamless self-service.
Exercise independent decision-making to partner with Product and Engineering VPs/Directors, ensuring rigorous alignment between the holistic customer experience and digital CX communications.
Lead, mentor, and elevate a high-performing Digital CX Engine.
Direct 4 specialized functional pillars: Process Excellence & Design Thinking, CX Change Management, AI Knowledge Architecture & Conversational Customer Experience Design, Digital Journey Strategy (Tech-Touch).
Define departmental OKRs, manage enterprise resource allocation, and foster a culture of agile experimentation ("fail fast, iterate rapidly").
Lead the organizational change management required to shift legacy teams to an AI-first customer engagement framework, guiding the enterprise through transformation and navigating organizational inertia.
Champion and govern the seamless integration of new digital tools, workflows, and AI interventions across global Customer Success, Support, and Sales teams.
Serve as the ultimate CX executive proxy in cross-functional product and technology roadmap meetings.
Ensure technical builds align with revenue-protecting CX strategies before interacting with the customer base.
Guide the business requirements for predictive customer health scoring models, utilizing machine learning to identify and act on churn risk or expansion opportunities before they materialize.
Partner directly with Data Engineering leadership to define CX business requirements for customer data, ensuring backend data models are capable of triggering intelligent customer interventions.
Translate complex "Big Data" sets (Salesforce, Gainsight, BI tools) into actionable, executive-level insights that drive org-wide CX strategic decision-making at the VP/SVP level.