Why the Chief Customer Officer Role Is Fracturing
Insider selling, FAANG absence, and quiet departures. The 2026 reality check.
Why the Chief Customer Officer Role Is Fracturing
The CCO title is supposed to signal that customer outcomes have a seat at the executive table. The data from May 2026 tells a different story.
Three patterns are converging at once.
The biggest companies in the world do not have a Chief Customer Officer on their executive committee.
The CCOs who do hold the title are quietly leaving, getting reassigned, or selling their equity. And the companies still hiring for the role are doing so with narrower scopes than the title implies.
If you are tracking the CS leadership market for your own career, your hiring plan, or your board-level conversations, this is the moment to look at what is actually happening instead of what the title is supposed to mean.
FAANG, Walmart, and JPMorgan Have No CCO on the Executive Committee
CX Network published a piece this month called "The silent CX crisis".
The most cited data point: Apple, Amazon, Meta, Walmart, and JPMorgan Chase do not have a Chief Customer Officer on their executive committee.
Walmart created the role in 2018 and then let it dissolve back into other functions over the following years. The other four never elevated it in the first place.
This matters more than it sounds.
These are five of the companies that set hiring benchmarks for the rest of the market.
When the world’s largest retailer, one of the world’s largest cloud providers, the world’s largest e-commerce platform, the world’s largest social platform, and one of the world’s largest banks all decide the customer function does not need a dedicated C-suite voice, the rest of the market reads that signal.
The signal is not “customer outcomes do not matter.” Rather, “customer outcomes get owned by a CRO, a COO, or a product leader instead of a standalone CCO.”
That distinction is the whole story.
The Insider Selling Pattern at Kaltura
Kaltura’s Chief Customer Officer Natan Israeli has been selling company stock on a near-weekly cadence since the start of May 2026.
The disclosed transactions include 13,965 shares on May 20, 13,229 shares on May 19, and an earlier sale of 3,600 shares, all executed under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted on December 15, 2025.
The weighted average price across the disclosed sales was around $1.51 per share.
Total cash out of the company stock position across these filings: approximately $47,000. The broader pattern, visible in the SEC Form 4 filings, shows additional sales on May 13, May 14, and May 18, bringing the May total well past 70,000 shares.
The 10b5-1 plan structure is the standard mechanism executives use to schedule equity sales in advance to avoid insider trading exposure. The legal cover is real. The market signal is also real.
Three filings in one week from a single CCO at a single mid-cap public company would not matter on its own. The pattern across the broader news cycle does.
In the same week:
Westfalia’s Chief Customer Officer Wim Destoop announced his departure after three years.
OCS appointed its CCO Bob Taylor to a new role as Managing Director of Public Sector FM, removing the CCO title from his portfolio.
A UK housing organization announced that its newly hired CCO Matt Foreman would be responsible for “neighbourhoods, independence and wellbeing (supported housing), and customer” services, a title applied to a four-function operations role.
A New Zealand grocery chain announced organizational changes through its “Acting Chief Customer Officer,” a title that indicates the permanent role is either being redefined or quietly downgraded.
None of these are individually scandalous. Together they describe a market where the CCO title is being absorbed, fractured, or transitioned out of.
What Is Actually Happening to the Role
Three structural shifts are running in parallel.
The CCO function is being absorbed into the CRO org
A growing number of B2B SaaS companies are folding customer success, customer support, and customer operations under a single Chief Revenue Officer.
The CRO owns the full revenue lifecycle including renewals, expansion, churn, and customer health.
The CCO becomes a VP of CS reporting up, or the role gets removed entirely.
The CustomerThink piece on sales-to-CS handoff failure published this month confirmed the pattern from the inside: "While CS teams can report to the CRO, many times these teams report to a Chief Customer Officer or the VP of Services."
The "many times" framing is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Five years ago it would have been "almost always."
Today it is one of three viable structures.
The CCO function is being absorbed into operations
Outside of pure software, the CCO title is increasingly used for broad operations roles that include customer service, retail experience, supported housing services, and similar functions.
The OCS appointment of Bob Taylor to Managing Director of Public Sector FM is a clean example.
The CCO title was a stepping stone to a P&L leadership role, not a destination.
The CCO title is being kept but the seat is not at the executive committee
This is the FAANG pattern.
Companies retain the CCO role for external positioning, internal coordination, and customer optics. They do not put the role on the executive committee.
Strategic decisions about customer outcomes get made by the CEO, the CRO, and the COO. The CCO executes.
All three shifts point the same direction.
The standalone CCO with executive committee voting power and full ownership of the customer outcome P&L is becoming rare.
What This Means for Your Career Path
If you are a CS director or VP plotting your next move, the implications are direct.
The path to CCO is narrower than it was three years ago. Fewer roles are being created at the standalone CCO level.
The roles that do exist increasingly come with fragmented scopes: CCO of a region, CCO of a product line, CCO with operations responsibilities outside customer success.
The path to CRO is wider than it was three years ago.
CS leaders who can credibly own the full revenue lifecycle, including new business attach, are being considered for CRO roles in a way that was unusual before 2024.
The skills that get you to CRO from CS are different from the skills that get you to CCO from CS.
Pipeline ownership, deal mechanics, and forecast accountability matter more than program design and customer maturity models.
The path to COO is opening for senior CS leaders at services-heavy companies.
If your CS function includes implementation, professional services, support operations, and customer education, the COO conversation is increasingly available.
For more on how the underlying CSM role is being repriced at the operator level, see the Microsoft CSAM 2026 role and career path breakdown on the Café. The signal at the IC and front-line manager level is parallel to what is happening at the C-suite level.
What This Means for Hiring CCOs
If you are a CEO, board member, or executive recruiter evaluating whether to hire a CCO, the questions to answer are sharper than they used to be.
What outcome does this role own that no other role can own?
If the answer involves renewals, expansion, and churn, that is now a defensible CRO scope. If the answer involves customer maturity, advocacy, and lifecycle program design, the role can be filled at the VP level without needing a C-suite title.
What is the reporting line to the executive committee?
If the CCO will not attend executive committee meetings, the role is positional rather than structural. Candidates evaluating the role will notice. Strong candidates will negotiate around it.
What does the scope look like at year three?
If the scope at year three converges on either CRO or COO responsibilities, the company is hiring the wrong title today.
What This Means for Vendor and Stack Decisions
The CS technology vendors built their go-to-market motion on the assumption that the CCO is the buyer. That assumption is weakening.
When the buyer shifts from CCO to CRO, the buying criteria shift with it.
CROs care more about revenue attribution, pipeline integration, and forecast accuracy than they care about health scoring sophistication or customer journey orchestration.
The vendors that adapt their messaging to the CRO buyer will keep growing. The vendors that continue to sell to the CCO function as if it owns the budget will see deal cycles lengthen.
This has implications for how you evaluate vendors during your next renewal cycle.
The CSM tool you bought when your CCO was on the executive committee may have been priced and positioned for a stakeholder who no longer exists at your company.
The Best Customer Success Platforms guide on the Café walks through what to look for when the buying decision moves up to the CRO.
Three Signals to Watch Inside Your Own Company
Three internal signals will tell you which direction your own company is moving.
1. Who chairs the renewal forecast call
If it is the CCO, the customer org still owns the revenue outcome.
If it is the CRO or the CFO, the customer org is a contributor to a forecast owned elsewhere. The forecast chair is the de facto owner of the outcome.
2. Who presents customer health to the board
If it is the CCO, the role has executive-committee weight even without the title. If it is the CRO presenting CS metrics alongside sales metrics, the customer function has been absorbed.
3. Who approves the CS budget
If the CCO approves it, the role is structurally protected.
If the CRO approves it, the CS function is a cost center inside the revenue org and will be optimized accordingly during the next budget cycle.
Any one of these signals shifting is normal. All three shifting in the same quarter is the structural move.
The Quiet Restructuring
The CCO role is not disappearing in 2026.
It is being restructured quietly enough that the trade press is still writing about CCO appointments as if the title meant the same thing it meant five years ago.
The data from this month says otherwise.
The biggest companies in the world have moved on. The CCOs who hold the title are leaving, being reassigned, or cashing out their equity. The companies still hiring for the role are giving it scopes that would have been called something else in 2021.
For CS leaders, vendors, and operators, the takeaway is the same.
Map the role you actually want by the responsibilities and the executive committee access, not by the title. The title is becoming the least reliable signal in the market.
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Hakan | Founder, TheCScafe.com