CarMax Combines Digital and Customer Roles Under New Chief

CarMax has named Elizabeth Dirgins as its new Chief Digital and Customer Officer, a newly elevated role that brings digital strategy and customer experience under one executive remit. Alongside the appointment, the used-vehicle retailer has promoted Jeff Campbell, signaling a broader reshuffle of its leadership bench.

The move consolidates oversight of CarMax's digital channels and customer-facing operations into a single leadership seat, rather than splitting those responsibilities across separate functions. Details on the scope of Campbell's new position were not specified beyond the promotion itself.

Combining "digital" and "customer" into one chief-officer title is itself a signal: it suggests CarMax sees its online and in-store experience as a single continuous journey rather than two separate workstreams competing for budget and attention. For a company built on large-ticket, trust-sensitive purchases like used cars, that alignment matters — friction in a digital tool or a disconnected handoff to a physical lot can derail a sale that took weeks to nurture.

For leaders watching the retail and automotive sectors, this is a useful data point on how organizations are structuring accountability for experience. Naming one executive responsible for both the technology stack and the customer outcome removes a common excuse — that digital teams optimize for conversion while experience teams optimize for satisfaction, with no one owning the tension between the two.

Title changes like this are easy to skim past, but they reveal how a company thinks about ownership of the customer journey. When digital and customer experience report to the same person, it becomes harder to hide behind functional silos when something breaks.

Most coverage of executive reshuffles treats them as org-chart trivia, but the structural choice here is the real story: CarMax is betting that experience quality can't be delegated to a "digital" team that only owns the interface. The operator's lesson is simple — if your digital and customer experience leads aren't the same person or a tightly joined team, someone is optimizing for clicks while someone else cleans up the consequences on the lot. Fix the accountability structure before you fix the funnel.