ABBYY Appoints Paula Sanders as Chief Customer Experience Officer

What happened

ABBYY, the intelligent document processing and automation software provider, has appointed Paula Sanders as its new Chief Customer Experience Officer. The appointment places customer experience as a distinct executive-level function within the company's leadership structure.

Why it matters

Elevating customer experience to a standalone C-suite role signals that ABBYY is treating CX as a strategic lever rather than a support function tucked under sales, marketing or operations. For software vendors competing in the intelligent automation and document-processing space, retention and expansion revenue increasingly hinge on how well customers are onboarded, supported and guided through product adoption — making a dedicated executive owner a meaningful structural choice.

The move also reflects a broader pattern among B2B technology firms: as AI-driven products become more complex, the gap between what a platform can technically do and what customers actually understand and use widens. A named CXO is one way vendors are trying to close that gap by giving customer experience a seat at the strategy table rather than leaving it to be absorbed piecemeal across departments.

The Renascence take

Appointing a Chief Customer Experience Officer is easy to announce and hard to make matter. The real test is not the title but whether the role carries budget, product influence and a mandate that reaches beyond support tickets into how the company designs, sells and renews its offering.

Most organisations that create a CXO role treat it as a coordination function — someone to smooth handoffs between sales, support and product. The operators who actually shift outcomes give the role authority over the moments customers experience as friction: onboarding complexity, unclear renewal terms, or support that can't resolve issues on first contact. If ABBYY's new CXO isn't empowered to change how the product ships or how contracts are structured, the title will be organisational decoration rather than a lever for loyalty.