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IT services firm Slalom has expanded its C-Suite by naming Amy Loftus, a former Accenture managing director, as chief customer officer.

The CCO role is a relatively new position that has come into fashion over the past decade among large enterprises, particularly those that operate in the B2B tech sector. Silicon Valley fixture Andreessen Horowitz has found that CCOs generally focus on two main priorities: reducing customer churn and supporting upsell efforts. In other words, CCOs are responsible for driving revenue growth. 

What generally sets such executives apart from a chief revenue officer is the way they go about boosting the top line. A CCO’s area of responsibility is not limited to the sales department alone, but also spans the customer support group and the other business units that interact directly with a company’s clients. The CCO’s job is to make those business units more productive in a way that will encourage clients to spend more.

Amy Loftus is taking over the CCO role at Slalom, a newly created post, following a roughly two-year stint as the head of the company’s East Coast business. She will continue to lead that business in parallel with her C-Suite work. Loftus joined Slalom in 2016 and earlier spent two decades at competitor Accenture, where she rose to become the managing director of the North American life sciences group.

Boardroom Insight reached out to Slalom for more information on the newly created CCO role and the consultancy’s customer service efforts. Global director of public relations Brandon Vaughan told us that “Amy plans to steer the company in a recommitment to customer-centricity. She plans to drive increased investment in industry skills to deeply understand Slalom’s customers’ needs and lead efforts to enhance Slalom’s focus on delivering customer solutions through accelerators that incorporate cutting-edge technologies.”

In the technology consulting world, accelerators are professional service offerings that meet two criteria. The first is that such offerings enable the client to achieve a goal, such as moving a legacy workload to the cloud, in a relatively short period of time, usually a few weeks. Additionally, buying an accelerator often gets a company not only professional services but also technical assets such as custom code.

“We have more than 700 partners and thousands of customers worldwide, so this work is important to us,” Vaughan added.

Seattle-headquartered Slalom has more than 13,000 employees worldwide. The consultancy provides a large menu of IT services spanning areas such as cloud, data analytics and AI. It also has a fairly strategy practice, supported by about 2,900 staffers, that helps corporate clients with high-level projects such as refining business plans. Slalom says it works with more than half of the Fortune 100 and about a third of the Fortune 500. 

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