CarMax Names Elizabeth Dirgins Chief Digital and Customer Officer

What happened

CarMax has appointed Elizabeth Dirgins to the newly combined role of Chief Digital and Customer Officer, the company has confirmed. Alongside the appointment, longtime executive Jeff Campbell has been promoted, marking a broader reshuffle of CarMax's senior leadership team.

The move brings digital strategy and customer experience oversight under a single executive remit at the used-vehicle retailer, signalling an intent to more closely align technology investment with how customers actually experience the brand across its buying and selling journey.

Why it matters

Pairing "digital" and "customer" under one chief officer title is itself a meaningful structural signal. Many large retailers still run digital transformation and customer experience as separate functions — one chasing platforms and automation, the other chasing satisfaction scores and service design — often with limited coordination. Combining them into a single mandate suggests CarMax wants digital investment decisions to be made with direct accountability for the customer outcomes they produce, rather than treated as a purely technical or operational exercise.

For leaders in retail, automotive and other high-consideration purchase categories, this kind of organisational move is often a leading indicator of where investment will flow next: expect emphasis on end-to-end journey design, integrated online-to-in-person experiences, and digital tools judged as much on customer impact as on efficiency metrics.

The Renascence take

Executive appointments rarely make headlines on their own merit, but the way a company titles a role often reveals more about strategic intent than any press statement accompanying it.

Most coverage of leadership appointments treats the title as a formality; the real story is the organisational bet being made. Fusing "digital" and "customer" into a single seat is an implicit admission that technology and experience can no longer be managed as parallel tracks — and it puts one executive on the hook when a digital upgrade quietly makes the customer journey worse. Operators watching this should ask themselves whether their own digital and CX leadership are structurally accountable to each other, or simply coexisting on the same org chart.