Lead, Customer Experience Transformation

Role Summary (Why This Role Exists Now)

Avalara's ability to improve customer satisfaction, retention, and operational efficiency depends on evolving the experiences customers have across their lifecycle. Achieving meaningful improvement requires more than identifying customer problems—it requires ownership of the transformation needed to solve them.

The Lead, Customer Experience Transformation owns the advancement of strategic customer experience priorities from opportunity identification through realized growth. You will identify customer and our needs, building the case for change, defining transformation strategies, shaping roadmaps, and mobilizing us around the projects that matter most.

Working across Product, Engineering, Operations, Support, Content, and Customer Experience teams, you will be the connective tissue between customer insight and enterprise action. You will align team members, coordinate complex efforts, and ensure customer experience improvements result in measurable customer and outcomes.

How You will Elevate Avalara

Business Impact

• Ensure Avalara invests in customer experience opportunities with the greatest potential to improve retention, customer satisfaction, growth, and operational efficiency.
• Connect customer priorities to business strategy, roadmap planning, and investment decisions.
• Accelerate the realization of value from customer experience transformation efforts.

Customer Impact

• Influence how you prioritize, improve, and deliver experiences directly with customer needs and feedback.
• Reduce friction across critical customer journeys and increase customer confidence, adoption, and loyalty.
• Improve meaningful improvements across the moments that matter most to customers.

Organizational Impact

• Create understanding across teams responsible for delivering customer experiences.
• Strengthen Avalara's ability to move from customer insight to action.
• Establish scalable approaches for governing and advancing customer experience priorities across the enterprise.

Manage Customer Experience Transformation Domains

• Lead the advancement of strategic customer experience priorities within assigned domains, from opportunity identification through delivered outcomes and measurable growth.

Identify Opportunities

• Use customer feedback, journey insights, operational data, and our goals to Identify opportunities that improve customer and our performance.

Build the Case for Change

• Develop business cases, transformation strategies, success measures, and recommendations that secure organizational agreement and investment.

Shape Enterprise Priorities and Roadmaps

• Partner with Product, Engineering, Operations, Support, Content, and Customer Experience leaders to ensure customer experience priorities are reflected in planning, investment, and roadmap decisions.

Mobilize Organizational Action

• Guide understanding, accountability, and momentum across team members, ensuring projects progress despite organizational complexity, and changing needs.

Realize Measurable Outcomes

• Define success metrics and ensure transformation efforts deliver measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, customer effort, adoption, retention, operational efficiency, and other important outcomes.

Establish Scalable Transformation Practices

• Develop repeatable approaches, governance mechanisms, and operating rhythms that improve Avalara's ability to identify on customer experience opportunities over time.

12-Month Success Signals

Within 12 Months

• Strategic customer experience opportunities identified into funded or approved transformation plans.
• Business cases, transformation strategies, roadmaps, and success measures established for assigned customer experience domains.
• Customer experience priorities reflected in planning, roadmap, and investment decisions across partner organizations.
• Partner aligned around shared customer experience priorities and outcomes.
• Main transformation projects launched and demonstrating measurable progress against customer and our goals.
• Customer insights incorporated into planning, prioritization processes.

Beyond 12 Months

• Demonstrated improvements in customer satisfaction, customer effort, retention, adoption, and operational efficiency.
• Sustainable transformation practices adopted across partner organizations.
• Customer experience priorities integrated into enterprise planning.
• Repeatable pipeline of customer experience opportunities progressing from insight to implementation and measurable impact.
• Increased organizational customer-centered decision-making and execution.

AI Expectations (AI Bar Raiser Standard)

Avalara is an AI-first company. You will expect to identify and advance customer experience transformation opportunities where AI creates meaningful value for customers, employees, and the business.

You will:

• Identify opportunities to use AI to reduce customer effort, improve self-service, increase operational efficiency, and strengthen customer outcomes.
• Incorporate AI-enabled capabilities into transformation strategies, business cases, and roadmap recommendations.
• Use AI to accelerate analysis, opportunity identification, prioritization and planning.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Data, and Operations teams to ensure AI investments align to customer and our priorities.
• Measure and communicate the growth of AI-enabled customer experience improvements.

We measure success not by AI adoption itself, but by the customer and outcomes that achieve success with AI's help.

Bar Raiser Expectations

At Avalara, a Bar Raiser improves the performance, quality, and effectiveness of the organization through their presence.

A Bar Raiser in this role:

• Demonstrate ownership from opportunity identification through realized growth.
• Identify opportunities that create meaningful customer and value.
• Use customer insight, and data to influence priorities and investment decisions.
• Create clarity, understanding, and momentum.
• Challenges assumptions and inspires action on the customer issues that matter most.
• Raise the quality of execution, and accountability across teams.
• Build scalable mechanisms that improve how Avalara delivers customer experience transformation.
• Be a force multiplier by elevating the performance of teams, leaders, and partners around them.
• Leave customer journeys, operating models, and organizational capabilities stronger than they were before.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree and 8+ years of experience leading customer experience transformation, business transformation, strategy, consulting, operations, product strategy, customer success, or related disciplines within a SaaS environment.
• Demonstrated experience identifying customer experience opportunities and translating them into funded projects, roadmaps, transformation programs, or strategic investments.
• Experience developing business cases, transformation strategies, operating models, or recommendations that influenced organizational priorities.
• Experience promoting understanding and action across Product, Engineering, Operations, Support, Content, and customer-facing organizations without direct authority.
• Demonstrated experience delivering measurable improvements in customer experience, retention, adoption, operational efficiency, or related outcomes.
• Analytical and problem-solving, including the ability to combine customer, operational, and business insights into applicable recommendations.
• Experience working with customer experience and performance metrics such as CSAT, NPS, customer effort, adoption, retention, efficiency, or growth.
• Demonstrated application of AI, automation, or digital capabilities to improve customer or outcomes.

AI is embedded in our workflows, decision-making, and products.  Success here requires embracing AI as an essential capability.

• You’ll bring experience using AI and AI-related technologies, ready to thrive here.

• You’ll apply AI every day to business challenges - improving efficiency, contributing solutions, and driving results for your team, our company, and our customers.

• You’ll grow with AI by staying curious about new trends and best practices, and by sharing what you learn so others can benefit too.

Total Rewards 

In addition to a great compensation package, paid time off, and paid parental leave, many Avalara employees are eligible for bonuses. 

Health & Wellness 
Benefits vary by location but generally include private medical, life, and disability insurance. 

Inclusive culture and diversity 
Avalara strongly supports diversity, equity, and inclusion, and is committed to integrating them into our business practices and our organizational culture. We also have a total of 8 employee-run resource groups, each with senior leadership and exec sponsorship. 

We’re defining the relationship between tax and tech.

We’ve already built an industry-leading cloud compliance platform, processing over 54 billion customer API calls and over 6.6 million tax returns a year. Our growth is real - we're a billion dollar business - and we’re not slowing down until we’ve achieved our mission - to be part of every transaction in the world.

We’re bright, innovative, and disruptive, like the orange we love to wear. It captures our quirky spirit and optimistic mindset. It shows off the culture we’ve designed, that empowers our people to win. We’ve been different from day one. Join us, and your career will be too.

We’re An Equal Opportunity Employer

Supporting diversity and inclusion is a cornerstone of our company — we don’t want people to fit into our culture, but to enrich it. All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, age, gender, national orientation, disability, sexual orientation, US Veteran status, or any other factor protected by law. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know.