About Me

Welcome to my site! 👋🏻

My name is Chris Carter and I don't fit into a neat little box. I moved out my junior year of highschool, got an apartment, and joined a sales team in Austin selling carpet and tile. I was fortunate enough to partner up with “one of the old guys” who had been doing this his whole life. He said to me, “Chris, what do you think we hired you to do here?” to which I replied “Sell carpet and tile?” “No Chris, we hired you to ensure our customers, your customers, are happier when they leave than when they came in. If you can do that, you’ll do just fine.”

It turns out he was on to something. Because it doesn't really matter what you're selling. Business is fundamentally about making people happier (Or at least it should be. I feel a debate coming on this one.). So providing value to the customer has been the common thread throughout my career, which I suppose really started 36 years ago. My wife teases me that I've had a lot of jobs, but I look at it as my real-world MBA. Each role was another tool in my toolbox, providing hands-on experience I never would have found in a classroom. My "curriculum" included:

Building from the Ground Up: I started in construction, working as a carpenter and tile setter on projects like schools, high-end homes, and the Round Rock baseball stadium. This taught me how complex systems fit together in the real world. Project planning, coordinating with different trades, and the importance of clear and concise communication.
Mastering the Front Lines: I’ve been a waiter, a grocery clerk, a collections agent for Dell Computer, and a customer service agent (a few times). I ran sales at Bicycle Sport Shop and even helped my Dad open and run his coffee shop. These roles put me face-to-face with the customer every single day.
Entrepreneurial Leadership: I built a Martial Arts Academy from zero students to nearly 200 in two years, handling everything from instruction to marketing and operations.
Corporate Strategy & Tech: I've navigated the corporate world as an investment advisor, a marketing director for Bicycle Sportshop, a strategist for a creative agency, and most recently leading Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs for Electronic Arts (EA), Atlassian, and now Cigna.

As a systems thinker, I see every job as a series of obstacles between A & B. But the old salesman from Color Tile taught me the most important part of the journey is ensuring people are happier at the destination than they were at the start. If you need help navigating that path, I'd love to connect.

Resume

Summary

Executive leader in Customer Experience and Voice of the Customer (VoC) with 15+ years of success building global programs that connect insights to measurable business outcomes. Proven track record of transforming fragmented feedback into enterprise intelligence, driving systemic friction reduction, and enabling revenue growth. Known for designing and scaling VoC frameworks at EA, Atlassian, and Cigna/Evernorth that improved satisfaction, accelerated digital adoption, and delivered multi-million-dollar operational savings.

Download Resume

Experience

Head of Digital Voice of Customer for Cigna, Evernorth
Evernorth Health Services | 2019 – Present

Lead the enterprise-wide Digital Experience VoC program spanning all Cigna and Evernorth brands. Responsible for designing measurement frameworks, delivering actionable insights, and partnering across product, research, analytics, and operations to reduce friction, improve member outcomes, and connect customer experience directly to business value.

Redesigned Cigna’s VoC framework to tie experience to revenue-impact metrics by implementing a journey-based measurement model that eliminated bias and enabled executives to link operational changes to financial performance with statistical confidence.
Enabled adoption of digital health and virtual care at scale via insights from the VoC program guided rollout of wellness tracking tools (reaching ~11M members) and expansion of MDLIVE virtual care for chronic condition management, significantly increasing engagement and revenue contribution.
Accelerated AI-powered CX Insights capabilities by contributed to the launch of a virtual assistant (adopted by ~67% of users, with >80% finding it helpful) and currently leading the roadmap for AI-driven root cause identification and resolution frameworks, reducing time to resolution and addressing systemic friction across customer and employee journeys.

Senior Program Manager – Voice of the Customer
Atlassian | 2014 – 2019

Designed and implemented Atlassian’s enterprise VoC function, establishing a centralized program to systematically capture, analyze, and operationalize customer feedback across the product portfolio. Partnered with research, product, design, and analytics teams to embed insights into strategic decisions, strengthen customer advocacy, and align operational improvements with business growth.

Drove a major increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS) from 9 to 37 by leading a cross-functional initiatives using targeted, segment-based research and improving root cause analysis frameworks to reduce systemic onboarding and administration friction in Jira.
Improved onboarding retention and conversion by developing new processes and owner-identification frameworks that eliminated systemic friction, directly reducing Atlassian’s already low cost of acquisition and reinforcing sustainable customer growth.
Increased CSAT by 54.5% via VoC-informed initiatives across support operations & training, product, IT and analytics.
Influenced Atlassian’s strategic direction, including the Trello acquisition by delivering reporting and insights that guided executive decision-making and demonstrated the business value of VoC as a driver of innovation and portfolio expansion.

Manager, Web and Strategic Project Analytics
Electronic Arts (EA) | 2011 – 2014

Led EA’s global Voice of Customer (VoC) strategy for their Worldwide Customer Experience (WWCE) organization. Managed a team of analysts responsible for capturing, measuring, and delivering insights across the end-to-end player journey. Partnered cross-functionally with executives, product leaders, and support operations to transform scattered feedback into actionable intelligence that reduced operational cost and improved player satisfaction.

Built and scaled EA’s first global VoC program transitioning from manual, title-specific reporting to automated business intelligence covering hundreds of games. This expanded executive visibility, increased delivery speed of insights, and enabled faster resolution of top customer issues.
Reduced $14M+ in support costs by launching a strategic analytics framework and issue classification taxonomy that improved efficiency, reduced misclassification of customer issues, and guided operational design changes with measurable financial impact.
Improved global customer satisfaction from 55% to 85% by introducing NLP-driven insights, segmentation analysis, and new dashboards with drill-down capabilities that allowed EA to identify systemic issues, enhance self-service, and drive continuous improvement in player experience.

Education & Professional Development

Coursework in Sociology at the University of Texas, Austin
Additional Coursework: Customer Experience, UX Research, Analytics, and Leadership programs
Continuous Learning: Ongoing engagement in AI-driven customer experience strategy, adoption frameworks, and VoC.

Core Competencies

Current Passion Projects

Neighbors Directory

Personal Project | Jun2025 – Present

Developed a neighborhood-focused community platform after recognizing limitations of existing tools like Facebook groups and HOA portals. The project provides residents with a dedicated space to connect, share resources, and organize local activities. Built with an emphasis on usability and community support, the platform also encourages mentorship and collaboration among neighbors, including opportunities for young entrepreneurs. Supabase | Render | Resend | OpenAI chatGPT LLM

CoachCarter.ai

Personal Project | Jan2025 – Present

This project explores how AI can provide everyday motivation and clarity in a supportive, approachable way. Designed around principles of behavioral psychology and humor, the project experiments with conversational AI to act as an encouraging voice people can turn to in daily life. The focus is on accessibility and relatability rather than therapy or self-help.

Trident HUD

Trident HUD is a prototype for a smart diving mask with an integrated AI-enhanced heads-up display (HUD). Features will include marine life detection, navigation assistant, and safety features. The mobile companion app will allow users to control integrations with existing dive computers, and real-time diver support.

CX Focused Projects

SOPs: Strategic Opperational Effectiveness

Purpose: Equip C-Suite and operations leaders to transform from firefighting mode to a balanced model that handles immediate issues quickly and systematically reduces the root causes that create them. This program leverages various strategic frameworks, thematic classifications, and feedback-to-action methodologies to prioritize and resolve issues in a way that ties to measurable ROI.

Continued contact volume is the result of underlying issues in the businesses governance model. This strategic program provides businesses with tools to reduce effort and friction related to systemic issues, while at the same time providing resources to remove the friction, therby reducing the overall contact volume.

I am currently speaking and offering workshops on:

Dedicated Acute Issue Response: Designing the structure, roles, and thresholds for incident handling.
Friction Prioritization and Action Framework: Categorizing and prioritizing issues to reduce effort and improve outcomes leveraging a value-based aproach to support customer and business goals.
Systemic Issue Resolution: Build sustainable fixes that remove recurring pain points.
T-Skills Assessments: Mapping and optimizing your team's skill distribution relevant to the team's goals and objectives.
Team Health Evaluation: Identifying your team's strengths and weaknesses relative to a research proven model of healthy team behaviors.
KPI & Goal Setting: Helping teams determine the value of their KPI and it's ability to track progress towards team & coporate goals.

Get in touch

Voice of Customer Programs

Design and Deploy: I partner with leadership teams to design and implement Voice of Customer programs that directly inform strategic and operational decisions. This includes defining the listening strategy, integrating feedback sources, and establishing governance to ensure insights are prioritized and acted on. The result is a unified view of customer experience, clear accountability for improvements, and a measurable link between customer feedback, operational efficiency, and business growth.

Writing

The AURA Protocol: A Prospectus for a Decentralized Health Ecosystem